Today Nelly and I went to a local farmers market in a suburb of Edmonton named Callingwood. The South Okanagan is well represented with fruit peddlers selling product from Greg Norton and a group called Dan and Steve. There is also a peddler who sells for an unknown grower in Keremeos.
The peddler always has a lineup of people waiting to buy his product. He always runs out of fruit and he closes his kiosk early. Today we asked one of those waiting what the lineup was about.
The answer was the taste! We looked closely at the peaches and most of them had rounded cheeks and were 2 to 3 days away from being soft enough to show bruises. We didn’t buy one for the taste test.
Surely this isn’t a secret closely guarded by the Keremeos grower. There must be someone who reads ODN who can tell us what the Keremeos grower is using to give his peaches a better flavor than those grown in the Okanagan Valley.
Is it the soil, the fertilizer, the variety, or the rounded cheeks? My guess is, the rounded cheeks, for the peaches we bought today from someone else had flatter cheeks and were tasteless when we tried them at home.
Coast story continued………
Our hotel kitchen was closed for breakfast. We heard several reasons, one was that the kitchen had new owners and was working on a new menu for three meals, the other reason was that the hotel was unable to hire the help needed to serve three meals.
To us the reason didn’t really matter, for all we knew was that we had to eat elsewhere. We found that one of the food chains served a filling breakfast for $6.00 each so we ate there.
The traffic heading south from Squamish was busy, the returnees from the Pemberton rock concert. The concert ended at 10 pm Sunday night so many elected to stay over and leave Monday morning, thinking they would avoid the rush. Not!
Our destination was Bowen Island. When we got to Horseshoe Bay, we had a small wait then scooted onto the ferry. We visited with my sister Trish and her husband then returned to Horseshoe Bay at 4 pm.
We got in line for the ferry to Nanaimo. We were backed up so far that we couldn’t see the ferry terminal. The ferry that came in at 4:50 pm we missed. The line moved but we still couldn’t see the terminal. There were porta-potties beside the road that needed attention but in an emergency they did the job.
The next ferry came in around 6 pm or so, we missed that one too, but now we could see the terminal. Around 7 pm another ferry came in, we hoped to get on that one.
With all this waiting, I couldn’t remain silent, I had to go and meet people. I stuck my head into the windows of three separate cars and struck up conversations. It was great fun!
The lineup inched its way down the hill until we were almost parallel with the modern bathrooms. We were waiting for the lineup to move when nature gave Nelly a call.
She had been gone a few minutes when the line started moving again. I drove as far away from the facility as I dared then pulled out of line to wait for her. The seconds ticked by and the lineup continued on its way. My blood pressure started to rise as I thought of being so close yet so far!
Come on Nelly, I thought to myself, we may miss the ferry! Finally, she exited the building and hustled over to the car. I put on my signal light indicating my intention to re-enter the lineup but no one would let me in so I just butted in and received an angry glare from the driver behind, at least it wasn’t the finger.
With 100 meters to go before boarding, we were stopped, the ferry crew needed to count cars. Again we had some anxious moments. The crew waved us on and we boarded.
Upon exiting the car I realized that we were 1 of the last 4 cars to board the vessel, whew! The occupants of two of the three cars I talked to were very concerned that we might not make the ferry. They were as relieved as we were that we got on.
One hour and forty minutes later we arrived in Nanaimo, found our hotel room and turned in. In the morning we had breakfast at the hotel. Hotel breakfasts are so convenient, I don’t mind paying a little more for the service. We conducted some business and took an afternoon ferry back to Horseshoe Bay.
We loaded up with peaches and headed east stopping in Windermere to see Nelly’s brother and family.