Okanagan Thurs-Fri

Friday is officially our last winery tour day, which is just as well since we are already about 4 cases in. Getting straight to business, we headed over to Quail’s Gate. We arrived about noon to find out they were reserving tasting times for 5 pm so we simply grabbed 9 random bottles of wines off the shelves and cashed out.

Because we knocked off Quail’s Gate so fast, we were WAY to early to head over to our late lunch reservation at Summerhill. We googled “things to do in Kelowna” and wound up at Evelyn Island wildlife refuge. We wandered around through the trails for about an hour to kill some time. I actually wanted to go the Kangaroo Creek Farm, but was disappointingly overruled based on safety concerns around animal transmission of COVID. Sigh. Fine. The wildlife refuge was lovely, despite Jeff and I both wearing the wrong kind of footwear for a 5k meander. We did manage to see a marmot and a super-cute little field mouse that was not even remotely afraid of us. Or he was rabid. (I go straight to worst case these days.)

Summerhill Pyramid Winery was our last stop, and proved to be a whole new level of Covidiot. It was SO busy and people didn’t seem to give two craps about keeping 6 feet apart. The staff were run off their feet trying to control the crowd. I want to feel bad for them but honestly, just having one single person limit the number of cars allowed into the parking lot would have solved a ton of their problems. We made reservations ahead of time for a late lunch, and then out our names on a list for a tasting in case a spot opened up. We did end up getting called for a tasting, with what we thought was ample time. But several problems quickly presented themselves. 1) The tasting area was *packed* in a very “what worldwide pandemic?” kind of way, although to be fair each section was cordoned off by plexiglass. 2) Our server was, in fact, serving two groups simultaneously so it took *forever* for each new pour. while he bounced back and forth between groups. 3) Every wine they sell was available for tasting, but not at every station, so our server had to go and hunt each wine down bottle by bottle as we selected the wines we wanted to taste. He did this one bottle at a time to “make it easier”. During our tasting, a group of six tourists came into the tasting area and started invading my personal space while they were talking to the hostess about how they just wanted to have a look around and I finally had to tell them to move 6 feet away from me. Covidiots.

The final miss on our Summerhill experience was our lunch, which we had moved to 3:15 after initially booking around 1:00. The person on the phone told us we were lucky because Happy Hour started at 3! But they failed to also mention that the lunch menu also wrapped at 3 to be replaced by a Happy Hour snack menu featuring salt & pepper fries and vegan “calamari”. That’s actually how it appeared on the menu – calamari in quotes. (Note to my vegan friends – if you don’t want to eat animal products that is JUST FINE, but for the love of god stop pretending your food is animal and just call it what it is – deep fried soybean – and be done with it.) I got a bit hangry at this lack of important information, but I ordered my half price wine and french fries and just sucked it up.

The bonus of our failed lunch was that we ended up eating dinner on the outdoor patio of the Manteo hotel where we’re staying and it was delicious! The best meal I’ve had here so far. So, silver linings. Plus we got to watch a pretty lovely sunset from our balcony.