There's good news and bad news about our Kelowna Hotel. The bad news: It needs some TLC --- paint and carpeting if not a total "make over." The good news: It is right across the street from the riverfront promenade which stretches for many blocks north along the lake shore and was a great place for a post-breakfast stroll on Friday morning. It's also a short walk to street lined with stores, restaurants, bars, coffee houses and bakeries (including one where we ate), and a short drive to the restaurants and wineries in and near town. The "Prestige" also gets the Most Wastepaper Basket in A Hotel award --- we have three in our room.
Friday's plan to visit local museums was thwarted: Three out of four in the immediate downtown area were closed. The old packing house where the B.C. Wine Museum and Orchard Industry Museum are located is undergoing renovation and won't re-open until November. A new exhibit was being set up at the Kelowna Art Gallery, so we couldn't visit it either (although Patricia, who was working at the front desk, answered an important question for us: Where does the water from Okanagan Lake go? Answer: It ends up flowing south into the Columbia River in Washington State, and then out to sea near Astoria, Oregon).
The Okanagan Heritage Museum is small, but has some interesting displays. A Hallicrafters SX-140 shortwave radio receiver, a copy of the the 1951 Amateur Radio Handbook, and telegraph keys that you could use to practice sending messages in Morse Code reminded me of hours spent listening to Ham Radio and international radio broadcasts from around the world when I was a kid. "I Think It's Downstairs Somewhere" was a recreation of basement storage areas that become the final resting places for things like LP music albums, old toys, golf clubs long since unused, and various items of old clothes. At the museum we also learned about Ogopogo, Okanagan's version of the Loch Ness Monster.
After a quick stop at our hotel we drove about 15 minutes south to the Father Pandosy Mission on the outskirts of Kelowna. Some of the buildings (mostly built of logs) are original to the site, while others like the Joseph Christien House were moved there from other locations. Rusty farm equipment like hay rakes and and old wheel tractor reminded me of ancient equipment on the farms where I spent summers as a kid. The blacksmith shop evoked memories charcoal burning red-hot in the forge of the place in Genesee, Idaho, where the farmers took their broken combine parts to be mended. The cream separator in the Brothers' House at the Mission was very similar to one I used to split fresh cow's milk into cream and whole milk. And the wooden desks with iron scrollwork bases in the school room on the second floor of the Christien house were just like those that I sat in when attending grade school in Seattle.
We continued our B.C. Wine Country culinary adventures that evening at the Eldorado Hotel with a three-course meal. Unlike our clueless waiter at the place where we dined the night before, our server apologized for the fact that the staff was still working out the kinks serving both the Wine Fest meals and the regular menu and brought us extra wine to make up for it.
Taking a break to powder my nose between the main course and dessert, I overheard a couple of Thirty-Something guys in the men's room say that the hotel's bar was a popular hang-out for "Cougars." This seemed highly unlikely to me since the 150+ decibel level of music blasting away in the bar certainly would have driven even the most brazen puma out the door and back into the woods. When we returned to our hotel it's "Avenue" bar was jammed full of "kids" half of age, too.
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