Slowville

After discovering that we couldn't trade in a our rented Toyota for one of Nixdorf's cool 1950's cars, we drove into downtown Summerland looking for a place to eat lunch.  Just as we discovered a week ago in Squamish, nearly everything but gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and grocery stores shut down on Sundays in B.C.  But the Carrot Top Diner was open for business, so we joined one other couple (whose young son was snoozing away the early afternoon in his stroller) as the only lunch-time patrons in this Mom and Pop eatery.

Satisfying our stomachs with split-pea soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, we headed south to Penticton at the southern end of Okanagan Lake.  We drove past nearly vacant motels ("Tiki Shores" was one) that line the lakefront and wandered around some of the old vessels that Canadian Pacific used to ferry passengers and cars up and down the lake in the early 20th century and which are now "museum pieces."  Roses still bloomed in the nearby public garden and bikers and skateboarders zoom up and down ramps in a riverside park.

There are 19 wineries on the "Naramata Bench" leading from Penticton to Naramata.  At the visitor information center (and wine shop) on Penticton we ran into Gordon, the general manager of a "nuts and bolts" company in Edmonton whom we had met at the Mount Boucherie Winery in West Kelowna the day before.  At his suggestion, on the way to our hotel we stopped at the La Frenz Winery and tasted some of their wines, then drove a little farther down to road to try those at Popular Grove. Like all of the Okanagan wine we've had thus far, the wines were all good to very good.

About 5:30 we arrived at the Naramata Heritage Inn built in 1908 by John Robinson as his personal home.  Later the building became a hotel, then a girl's school, then a hotel again, then it shut down until restored and re-opened as the present inn.  Robinson is credited with starting the Okanagan fruit industry which still grows apples, pears and peaches.  Today the steep hillsides that tumble down to the lake near Naramata are mostly covered with vineyards and second homes rather than fruit orchards and the apple packing plant in town closed down about three years ago.

After checking in we walked along the shore to the site of the old wharf pier where steamers like the one we had seen turned into a museum in Penticton had once delivered passengers and freight.  Only one other couple was in the adjoining park and the only sound we could hear came from a dog  barking incessantly in a nearby yard.  The lakefront homes looked to be vacant; presumably their owners left their summer places at the end of the season and went back to the big cities of Canada.

The hotel had been busy on Friday and Saturday when it put on Wine Fest dinners, but on Sunday and Monday there were only a few diners other than ourselves.  Only a half-dozen cars were in the hotel's lot so probably only half of the inn's dozen rooms were filled during our stay.

On Monday morning we wandered around the quiet town of Naramata, found a stream with spawning Kokanee salmon, and viewed paintings by local artists at a show in the social hall of a local church.  After lunch we drove north to the end of the road, then hiked a section of the old Kettle Valley Railroad whose tracks have been torn up and the roadbed turned into a long hiking trail.  Unfortunately, big new homes are being built both above and below this section of the KVR and hiking this part of the trail will be less scenic in the future.