We're into August, and so the title of this entry has a double meaning. It's documenting the getting there on our recent vacation, but it's also a reflection of my Christmas-mania and how much I yearn for the holiday season (and to escape the heat of summer). I'm playing Christmas-adjacent music this morning while I write this blog and cards and such to friends. Sorry, not sorry. It puts me in a nice mood.
Anyway, the getting there, vacationwise. Let's tackle that. I'll break up the vacation into a few entries, as is my usual wont. Shall we get going?
Going back a week and a half, then, we found ourselves not at Burbank Airport, our now-preferred starting point, but at LAX.
Ah well. A direct flight to Vancouver is a good thing. We had lounge time,
then boarded,
and it was a smooth flight north. A window seat for me for a change, and so I caught the view from time to time and enjoyed picking out familiar landmarks and locales from above.
It was a quick transit through customs, a long wait for our bags, and then upstairs in the airport to the
Fairmont Hotel there. Our room
had a nice view over the airport itself,
and the next day I spent a little time just peacefully watching planes landing.
The trip was a birthday trip for two of us. A mini-milestone for me during the trip, and celebrating a larger milestone for Courtney to come later this month. She and Robert were due to land later that evening, so Conrad, Van, and I hopped onto the Canada Line and headed into downtown Vancouver
to meet Marie at
the Club for dinner.
What a gorgeous evening for sitting out on the patio.
So good. Cocktails and a nice meal (a poke bowl for me),
and catching up.
We would see Marie again a few days later, and the day after that, but it was nice to have her just to ourselves.
I'll see a lot of her this year, happily.
Back at the hotel, Conrad and I let Van go to bed early and headed to the hotel bar to meet up with Courtney and Robert and enjoy a nightcap. That nightcap turned out to be a BC red,
from a winery I did not know, but I've enjoyed the Similkameen reds in the past, so we took a chance. And enjoyed it! It would have been better with some food, I admit, but it was otherwise good.
Thursday morning we checked out, picked up the rental car (the convenience of staying at a hotel built into the airport!), and the five of us were on the road. I have seen the route before, and I am a little bendier than Conrad, so he did the driving into the Okanagan, and I was crammed into the very back.
That's ok - uninterrupted napping! We stopped for lunch in Hope (no photos, sorry) and then kept on to Kamloops, passing through that city an continuing along the river to
Monte Creek Winery.
I didn't want to make this whole trip about wine tasting, I swear, though that is a very easy thing to do in the Okanagan. I couldn't resist us stopping here, though. First off, the modern building
in the Thompson Valley setting is quite something, especially with blue summer skies.
Second, it broke the trip into thirds, which was nice - two hours for each segment, which was manageable for all. So we stopped, and Courtney, Robert, and I sipped some wines,
buying a few bottles among us.
And then back on the road, taking the old route from Kamloops to Vernon, skirting through the western side of that town, then up into the hills south of the city and between the lakes to our hotel: Predator Ridge. A golf resort, curiously enough, and I'll comment on that in a future post. But we were here, our destination for three nights. With great thanks to our lovely driver, Conrad. We settled in,
and started on the Okanagan part of our vacation....
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