Thursday, October 01, 2009
Wine Country
The original purpose of our trip to BC was to "do" the Okanagan Wine Country. We, of course, were doing this as good parents... Kirsten is doing her thesis on something relating to water and agriculture in the Okanagan. So we duly tasted the water and the wine (agricultural product)--and dawdled as much as we could. We had 4 wineries on our "must visit" list and visited 3 of them--plus 3 others--in the course of 3 days. The Okanagan may be the Napa Valley of BC but it doesn't yet have the tour buses--nor the big parking lots. Even though we visited the big name wineries, parking our rig was often a challenge. But the wines were excellent and we had a good time. Kit was especially excited that we got to ride our bikes into one of the wineries (chosen just because it was on our bike route.) If we make another trip we'll try to find out some good small wineries where we can actually talk to the farmers or wine makers.
We spent 2 nights at 2 different RV parks in Oliver which may someday be the Calistoga of the Okanagan. It has a nice downtown (with a major highway running through it)--with a quilt shop and really nice art gallery, and even a few useful stores. We had dinner at the Indian restaurant. There are not any nice hotels in the area to draw in the dinner crowd so there are not the upscale restaurants you might expect in wine country. The thing we liked the most of course--was the paved bike trail running along the river and through the center of town. The second night's RV park was right on the trail.
We left BC with 8 bottles of wine. (Came home with 7) We thought we might have to pay duty on them but no worries. We sadly passed all the wonderful farmer's market stands in BC so as not to take fruits and vegies across the border. Then we found out any BC grown foods are OK to bring into the US. It is imported stuff they are looking for. Going into Canada it is the other way round. You supposedly can't take any fruits/ vegs into Canada. At least that's the way it was this trip.
# posted by Carol Harma @ 1:44 PM 
