I forgot to mention that in addition to visiting seven wineries and a cheese maker, the wine tour also included a stop to pick up some fruit. The Okanagan has been cranking out a lot of this fruit stuff for a long time. In fact, the vineyards are the johnny-come-latelies. Most of our crew raved about the peaches, which had come in early due to the unusually early, long and hot summer.
I’m something of an apple man – the fruit more so than the computer – so I was impressed by the apple orchards with trees “trained” to grow into perfect rectangles only as high as a person can reach, and in neat rows to boot. These tactics, developed by the Canadian government’s farm scientists, result in reducing the farmers harvesting costs considerably while increasing output substantially. All this with bits of string, wire, and pruning, producing a mind-boggling wide variety of apples, many of which I had never heard of. Pretty cool. Continue reading 13. Fire Mountain
A column of smoke marked another wildfire in the forest not far from our destination. For the rest of the day, lake water-skimming tanker planes flew low overhead on their way to pick up and dump huge quantities of water on the blaze, a dangerous business.
