South Thompson Inn, Kamloops, BC -- At the end of May, Ben and I passed the 20 year mark in our marriage, which may not seem like a lot to other folks, but if you were inside this marriage, you’d be really amazed. (Okay, I just wrote that for my husband. A bit of a tweak, you know.) Actually, there are members of my family who are amazed, I am sure, although they have the good graces not to mention it, often.
Truth be told, I can’t imagine what the past 20 years would have been like without him, but I guess that’s always true of any portion of our lives. We can’t imagine a different path or outcome, aside from engaging in fantasy, like some journalists-cum-novelists we know who have managed to not only rewrite their lives, but improve themselves immensely in the process.
So what does this have to do with travel? We were too busy at the end of May to take a proper vacation to celebrate this milestone, and instead, planned a trip to Kamloops, BC – yep, Canada – for the end of June, and here we are. It’s a bit like going to Grand Junction, Colorado, for a vacation. Looks like it, anyway. So it probably deserves an explanation.
Kamloops wasn’t our first choice, really. A couple of years ago, back when the market was flying high and we were flush with cash, we thought we’d take one of those super-fancy little-boat cruises around New Zealand and play all of the incredible coastal golf courses for two weeks, and maybe get in a hike or two. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and daily golf, all for just a tidy little $11,000 each.
But a market crash later, we’d scaled down our plans to a trip to Bandon, Oregon, for a week of golf on the area’s famed links. Then, a recession-led pay cut later, and we scaled down again, finding that we could play the No. 1 new course in Canada for 2008, and four other courses, and stay in the nicest places in the region if we went the same distance from our Seattle home – but north and east instead of south and west. And it would cost us half as much as Bandon, and about one-eighth of our fantasy New Zealand cruise. So, here we are in Kamloops, BC., a place a golfer we met today called, “not one of our nicest towns in Canada.” We’ll see when we take a trip into town later.
We flew to Kelowna, and after some self-inflicted hassles trying to get the rental car (you have to use the right key for the right car, dummies), we drove north out of town, remarking how the territory looked like parts of Colorado. We pulled off the freeway just past the town of Lake Country, and followed typical wine-country roads that wound around vineyards and then plunged in big hairpin curves down to Lake Okanagan. We had lunch at Gray Monk Winery with a spectacular view.
After lunch, we sampled the winery’s pinot and gamay noir at the complementary tasting, settling on a bottle of the gamay. We asked the cashier if we could buy the wine in Seattle, and she wrote down the name and phone number of the distributor in Seattle for us, so we can find it at home if we still like it enough to pay $20 for a bottle later.
We chugged our way about half-way back up to the highway (we’re driving a Chevy Cobalt, you see) and stopped at the Arrowleaf Winery, where preparations were under way for a wedding on the winery grounds that evening. Ben suggested moving along without the tasting, once he found out it cost $2 a person, but I convinced him it wasn’t REAL money (just Canadian), and it was the only other winery we would visit that day, out of about four dozen in the area. So, we paid our fee and sampled some more pinot and blends, and agreed on a zweigelt, an Austrian red. My previous experience with Austrian wines has been limited to gruner veltliner, so it was nice to discover a new dry red wine to add to our options.
We then drove through country that changed from thick pine forests to craggy, folded hills covered sagebrush and jack pines that evoke the western-most counties of Colorado and the dry steppes of central Montana. Diving down to the Thompson River, we passed ranches and horse farms until we spotted our hotel across the river on the left. We arrived at the gate of the South Thompson Guest Ranch, wondering if we’d made the right choice. The equestrian center bespoke the “horsey set,” which neither of us can identify with, and the sprawling inn was swarming with wedding guests who filled the rooms and porches in anticipation of two weddings that were taking place here that night.
We took to our room, a pleasant wood-floored, wainscotted room with a full view of the river and surrounding hills, and sets of wicker chairs on the balcony. Horses and paddocks behind us and only the flowing river in front of us, we forgot about the horsey set and the weddings and settled in for a comfortable night.
Tomorrow, we start our golf adventure with Tobiano, the No. 1 new golf course in Canada in 2008, a little worried about the weather. We’ll see what happens.
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