road trip – day ten (penticton to kelowna)

this was our wine tasting day! first we stopped at the Wine Country Visitor Centre in

Penticton, which incidentally is the largest one and worth stopping at. They had a couple wines for tasting. We enjoyed the Thornhaven 2005 Gewurztraminer so that was our first winery stop (in Summerland).

View of Lake Okanagan and the vineyards from Thornhaven Estates Winery:

Summerland-Thornhaven

The next winery stop was for lunch and tasting at Sumac Ridge Estate Winery just north of Summerland. I had a really good artisan cheese plate paired with their excellent 2002 Black Sage Vineyards Merlot. I absolutely loved that wine. We also had our first taste of ice wine here. I didn’t expect to like it since I normally don’t like sweet dessert wines, but the ice wine was very nice! Guess I’m a true Canadian, eh? We bought several bottles of wine here.

We found a B&B in Peachland that allowed dogs. the hosts were wonderful and had their own bernese mountain dogs. they also had a wonderful walking trail right outside their home. i was very happy to have found this place! incidentally, there are bed and breakfasts *everywhere* in the Okanagan Valley, which i think is nice.

Here’s what the B&B looks like. Cute!

Peachland-BandB

This is one of the views of Lake Okanagan from the road to the bed & breakfast:

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We had overcast skies most of the time we were there, but for us that was very fortunate because it was warm out and the clouds kept the dogs cooler. Didn’t help us get gorgeous blue lake photos, though. Next time!

Our next stop was the Mission Hill Winery in Westbank. This is a gorgeous (and very large) winery. We didn’t buy any wine there (this time) but did take lots of photos.

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Don sitting in the grass amphitheatre:

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The next two wineries we went to were in Kelowna (west of the lake):

Quail’s Gate Estate Winery – very beautiful, small winery

Mount Boucherie Estate Winery – of all the wines we tasted on this trip, we were perhaps most impressed with the wines from this small establishment.

Next we crossed the floating bridge into downtown Kelowna, stopping for a walk at City Park. Little did we know that dogs weren’t allowed on the grass or the water– good thing we didn’t get caught!

Don with Lola, and Christine with Sport– posing with part of the Ogopogo monster. 🙂

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A statue of sails:

Kelowna-CityPark

For dinner, we made the “mistake” of trying a sushi restaurant in Kelowna. I was craving sushi, but you really don’t want to get sushi that far inland. Don warned me, but I didn’t listen. 🙁 It actually wasn’t that bad. just not much of a selection.

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