Summerhill Winery

Summerhill Winery, just south of Kelowna, perches on a series of undulating grassy hills overlooking Lake Okanagan. It features a pyramid-shaped wine cellar which, if you peruse the website, purportedly has a noticeable effect on the taste of the wine aging inside. The winery offered my tour group four types of wine for tasting: red, white, red icewine, and white icewine. Icewine is a dessert wine, and the Summerhill varieties live up to the spirit wholeheartedly - they are amazingly sweet. In fact, the white icewine in particular is strongly reminiscent of lychee syrup. A connoisseur, however, can tell the subtle difference: lychee syrup is $13/bottle while Summerhill icewine is $70-$100/bottle. It translates into a slight sting both on the tongue and on the wallet but, I suppose, makes a more socially acceptable dinner party gift.

Lake Okanagan

At Lake Okanagan, while searching for the elusive water creature called Ogopogo, I found this marvelous contraption - an instant money machine! Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how it works, but I'll give a million dollars to someone who can.

Canadian Rockies Tour - Day 1

Hello, friends. I didn't have access to a computer while I was on vacation, so this will be a belated blog of my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies. I realize that a post-mortem summary is not as exciting as a real-time blog, so just for fun, I will write in small chunks, and you can pretend that I am posting things on the day they happen. You'll have to disregard the timestamps, of course, as they are not reflective of the long days of travel interspersed with hypothetical stolen moments spent writing blog entries. Just imagine. =) And now...

DAY 1: The road to Kelowna

The tour bus pulled over at a rest stop on the trans-Canada highway from Vancouver to Kelowna, which features several of the mysteriously shaped trash receptacles pictured here. I tried to throw away an apple core, only to tug ineffectually at the lid of one of these things. Eventually, a nice Canadian lady explained to me that these are bear-proof trash cans and showed me how to stick my hand in and press the hidden latch that opens the lid. You have to be extra careful in summer, she warned, because wasps sometimes build nests in the space where you stick your hand. Day one of the tour and already I have learned a valuable tidbit: Canadians feel no compassion toward penniless, hungry bears.