State of the Savage: December 2018/January 2019

2018 was a year of new frontiers and old haunts, of fast friends and budding acquaintances, and of familiar ideas and fresh insights. For the last eight years of Traveling Savage I’ve had the great fortune to pursue my passions of travel and writing with my favorite people in my favorite places, and the first post of 2019 seemed like a good time to reflect on the preceding year.

In May I kicked off a trip focusing on Angus, Aberdeenshire, and Speyside with stints in Glasgow and Dundee, a city I visited for the first time. Glasgow is always fun and the best place in Scotland to satisfy your cultural cravings. I had a chance to connect with my pal David and see his new office: The stillhouse at Clydeside Distillery. Dundee, meanwhile, feels like a cross between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and its star is on the rise. Not only is the energy in Dundee building, it also makes a great base from which to explore Angus, Fife, and even parts of Perthshire. Speaking of Angus, its charms range from seaside to mountainous and everything in between with a focus on history.

The focus on history continued in Aberdeenshire where every bend in the road led from prehistory to the Middle Ages. Sometimes it felt like I was discovering things like the South Ythsie stone circle or Findlater Castle. Distilleries were a definite sub-theme of this trip, and I visited Auchentoshan, Clydeside, Arbikie, Glen Garioch, Glendronach, Benriach, Strathisla, and Ballindalloch among many shorter pop-ins in Speyside. All in all it was a fantastic trip that covered the geographic and interest spectrum. Some of my favorite moments from the trip include Dundee’s RSS Discovery, the Banffshire Coast, Dunnottar Castle, and Glen Esk.

Over the summer I relaunched Traveling Savage with a completely new design and navigation. After nearly nine years of blogging many of my articles were either difficult to find or no longer relevant (the early non-Scotland-focused ones). With the help of a great local web design firm, I cleaned up the site and ushered it into the world in July. The navigation map with pins for each post had long been a dream and that coupled with an improved display of photos fulfilled a dream years in the making.

In autumn I returned to Scotland with my dad to visit Argyll and Bute. This region was another one I’d wanted to explore in more depth than simply a handful of drives between ferry terminals. Boy was that a good decision. Arygll’s many hidden folds, peninsulas, and islands are ripe for exploration, and together my dad and I saw an incredibly beautiful slice of Scotland in crisp autumnal weather. From compact Bute to the isolated Cowal Peninsula and Argyll’s secret coast we journeyed to distant Campbeltown before digging into ancient Kilmartin in the heart of Argyll. I loved the breadth of this trip, from gorgeous coastal scenery to 5,000-year-old rock carvings to one-of-a-kind distilleries like Springbank.

Traveling Savage has always been a professional venture, but it has also facilitated my personal life. Somewhere in between my two Scotland trips I managed to vacation in France and Spain with family and friends irrespective of vacation days or paid time off. That is a gift, and an equally large one is the time I’ve had to myself to be introspective, meditative, and outside the net of modern messaging. Answers wait in these quiet spaces. My Picture This posts are a catalogue of just a few of them.

I hope 2019 treats all of us well, and that whatever you’re battling you come through victorious.

Sláinte!