The Western World

After the long weekend we drove straight to Vancouver, where we stayed with our friend Fish (Tom is his real name! He used to work with us at the Peaks) at his amazing penthouse apartment in Kitsilano - a neighbourhood in Vancouver that is right on the ocean. Our friend Mia, who also worked at the Peaks, is now a flight attendant and she flew out to hang out with us all for the day. It was an amazing Peaks reunion that involved the beach, the ocean, beers, burgers, water balloons, and a whole lot of fun on Fish's rooftop patio. The next morning Mia flew out and we had a nice relaxing day checking out Vancouver.
Then - completely opposite to anything we've been doing lately - Katie actually flew to Boston the next day for a few days to celebrate her brother in law's 40th birthday, and catch up with that side of the family. During that time Chris got to stay with Fish, who showed him around the adventure side of Vancouver - he longboarded, climbed Grouse mountain, frisbeed, and had lots of adventure.
After our solo adventures we were so excited to be back on the road, and we explored Kamloops and the area. We were defeated a couple of times by the Forestry Service Campgrounds that we had fallen so in love with, because many of them are really backcountry and we can't tell on the map whether they will be easy roads or intense switchback rock roads. The Mazda is so weighed down from all of the stuff we have in it, so a couple of times we had to give up on finding the campsites in order to save the bottom of the car from being ripped apart. In fact, for our night in Kamloops, we spent so much time going to Forestry campgrounds and turning around halfway there, that finally at 10:30 we had to call it quits and we set up at Paul Lake Provincial Park in the dark. Gone are the days when we are watching the sun set at 11 pm ... now by 9:30 we're in the dark!
The next day, we headed northwest to Cottonwood Creek Campground, after checking out Lillooet and (of course) getting rejected by some very severe logging roads that did not get along with the Mazda. It was a beautiful campsite on the river, and we indulged in a delicious steak dinner with green beans, bbq-ed zucchini, and peppers.
We headed into Pemberton the next afternoon, which was a great small town that we explored for a while. We stayed at another awesome Forestry site that night, which felt like it was in the middle of the jungle it was so lush, and the trees around us were huge! Quite the difference from the dry landscape of Kamloops area we had been in only a few days before.
The next day we packed up and headed to Squamish, where we got some groceries and had coffees at an awesome little local cafe (The Cup), and then we headed to our first night of camping in a privately owned campground with Katie's "Labour Day Family" friend Stephanie Furlong and her boyfriend Ryan. It was awesome! You just set your tent up on the beach along the river and call it your site. We had a great dinner and met the people in the site next to us, who turned out to be around our age and from Owen Sound! We had a blast with all of them ... we even had a big bocci ball tournament. It was an amazing night.
We left Squamish very groggily the next morning and headed into Whistler, where Katie's friend Darcey lives. It was the last day of a week long international mountain biking competition (Crankworx)on Whistler Mountain, so it was crazy busy but so fun to watch the finals of the freestyle part of the competition - who knew that there was downhill mountain biking freestyle! These guys were doing double back flips off of 80 foot dirt jumps ... it was wild. We ate dinner at the restaurant Darcey works at after touring around the village and having a blast people watching and taking it all in. After she finished work, we spent the night meeting a ton of really nice people who called Whistler home, who all were very intent on convincing us that Whistler was definitely better than any other place to live. Hmmmmm!
Today we had such a great relaxing day - we took air mattresses to the nearby lake and floated around, surviving the 34 degree cloudless heat by hopping off into the water whenever it got too unbearable. We're about to have a big farmer's market dinner of bison sausage with corn, peppers, salad and fresh bread. Delicious!
On to Vancouver Island tomorrow to keep on exploring ... we hear it's beautiful and are really excited to look around.

Super Side Track

We checked out the town of Rossland the next morning, which in itself wasn’t that exciting but Red Mountain nearby was definitely really nice. Once we were on the road past Rossland, it was officially labeled as the "BC Super Side Track" on all the government signs, which we though was pretty awesome since that pretty muchs sums up the whole trip. We set up camp in Kootenay Creek Provincial Park that afternoon, learning that it was probably best to set up early and then explore since the area was so busy. And wouldn’t you know it, we had to camp in the “overflow”, which is really just a nice way of saying “extra-parking-lot-where-you-can-set-up-your-tent-in-the-grass-beside-the-pavement”. It was literally one parking spot per tent, but at least we were right beside the beach and had a place to lay our heads!
After a swim we went and checked out Nelson, which was an absolutely awesome town. It was as hippy-ish as we had heard, and the whole area was so laid back. It was built around the lake on a slope, so even its look was cool. We toured around for a bit before heading back to camp, where after a pasta dinner Chris pulled out his telescope and hung out on the beach looking at the very bright moon and stars. After showers the next morning we went to Revelstoke, where we set up at Martha Creek Provincial Park, which felt appropriate, and then went to the town to look around. It was another really amazing town, which had a great main street that felt small town-ish while still having all the shops necessary. It was gorgeous. That night back at the campsite we watched a really wild storm head our way overt the mountains and lake, and then the wind got so intense that at the exact same time as our neighbour’s (unattended!!) fire started spraying huge sparks all over our tent, our tarp got ripped up and half of it went straight into the air like a huge wind sail. Luckily nothing caught fire and after a bit of a struggle we got the tarp down and into the car. The light on the rain even made it look like a funnel cloud was headed our way for a bit, but in fact we only got about 45 minutes in total of the storm; across the lake had it was worse and we even heard trees falling from all the lightning.
The next morning we headed north to Yoho National Park, where we checked out a ‘bridge’ made from water pounding against rock until it caved at the bottom, leaving a bridge of rock across the powerful waterfall. We also did a 5.5 km walk around Emerald Lake, where we got to see the cabins Katie stayed in years ago and also the rock where she and the family jumped into the near freezing glacial lake! It was a beautiful walk, and the lake is true to its name – its colour made us keep stopping and staring it was so memorizing, We also practically walked right into a deer who obviously didn’t care at all that we were around – she just kept on munching away beside her perfect lake.
We had the strangest wake-up call yet this trip the next morning. Katie woke up to a lady in the neighbouring campsite saying there was a bear nearby, and then suddenly they were banging pots and pans and shouting that it wasn’t in their site anymore, “it’s in the one beside us, right between their tent and their car!!” whaaaaat? Chris woke to “Chris Chris there is a BEAR in our CAMPSITE!”, but by the time we got to the tent window to see it was already gone. Apparently it had spent some time sniffing around our car and grunting about, and then decided there was nothing good around and moved on. Closest call with a bear yet, and we didn’t even get to see it! Since we were up, we packed up and headed out to Golden. We found out that BC has their own version of “Provincial Recreation Areas”, which are owned by the Ministry of Forests. Basically, since logging is such a huge thing around here, and they have to make roads to log, they make use of the otherwise abandoned roads to create small camping areas – 5-15 sites with an outhouse – that are far away from civilization and (our favourite part) free! So we set up at Waitabit Creek about half an hour from Golden, right on the water. We spent the first part of the evening at a wolf sanctuary, where we even got to howl with the wolves and learn a lot about them. That night we met up with a friend from home, Doug, who showed us a local bar where we had a beer and enjoyed some live music before heading back to our site. Golden: another amazing relaxed BC town – this isn’t going to be easy!
We've also had a lot of fun checking out the "runaway lanes" all over the BC roads ... with all of the steep grades and so many trucks coming through the province, they have developed "brake check" areas at the top of huge hills, followed by the runaway lanes along the hill itself which are literally just lanes that veer off the road and smack into the forest beside it for cars with failed brakes. The weirdest one we saw was a lane that veered off the road, only to join back up with it 100 metres later! So basically you get a moment away from traffic until your car has to zoom back into it uncontrollably. How bizarre.
On Friday morning we got up nice and early and headed west again. After getting an oil change (we have now put 15,000 km on the Maz this trip!), gas, and groceries, we went a couple hundred kilometres north of Revelstoke to one of the Forestry Service campgrounds, with the intention of getting as far away from long weekend craziness as we could. Mission accomplished – we went to Sprague Bay, at the very end of the road and 15 km on a dirt one, where there were about 8 sites and we were set up on a hill above the lake, surrounded by rolling hills and mountains. We spent the next two days doing nothing but relaxing in the sun (at our own private “beach” of smooth sloping rock), swimming, playing scrabble, watching the hummingbirds that were everywhere, sitting by the fire, reading, and enjoying the peace and quiet of our long weekend away from the long weekenders. Aside from our cooler spoiling our milk and our neighbour who watched loud movies in his RV, we were in heaven. If there is nothing else to love BC for (and oh, there is), we have fallen in love with the Forestry Service camping!

We made it ... BC!

It’s been a long while since out last update, (sorry!), so we are going to do two again.

The day after our last update was a long one and such a great one. We had bought a “summer pass” that was being offered, which got us each a ticket for the gondola up Sulphur Mountain, a one hour horseback ride through the valley around the Bow River, and tickets to the Banff Upper Hot Springs. We did the gondola first, which was another great memory for Katie, since she had been up there both with her Dad when she was 11, and her Mom and Mo when she was 18 (and where she encountered the infamous “Eduardo!” crying child!) The view from up there was so stunning. We got the gondola all to ourselves both ways, since there were no other couples around, just hoards of camera happy tourists who wanted to stick together, so that was awesome. We cruised around a side path while the crowds thinned out, and even got to watch a tiny little baby Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel putter around and nibble on whatever he could see. When we were done we went to the horse stables, where we were partnered with our horses and taken out to ride the trail. It was wicked! It was such an awesome way to see the area and it was just so fun to be on horses. Every so often we even got to gallop on them, which was such a blast. Chris’s horse was quite the restless one, so he had a hilarious adventure trying to keep it away from the fields where it really just wanted to hang out and eat grass all day. The cool thing was that the hour felt much longer, and to be honest our bums may not have been able to handle much more!

When we were done we ate some lunch at a rest stop up on Tunnel Mountain, where other than some runaway green peppers (man those things can roll!) we had a really nice lunch with a great view. We did a mini road trip to Canmore that afternoon, where Katie had fallen in love with the Rockies years before, and it was definitely a gorgeous town. We toured around in our car and admired houses that will never be in our price range, and did a walk along the river, then headed back to Banff to soak up the sunset in the Hot Springs. It was so glorious (not to mention free showers!). We went back to camp and devoured quesadillas, and relaxed by the fire before calling it a night. What a great day!

The next day we said goodbye to Banff and explored Kootenay National Park (we were officially in BC!). We did an awesome little hike through a canyon, checked out some crazy coloured lakes and looped through Radium, the town at the south end. It was a nice relaxed day, ending with a fire and some Scrabble. We left in the morning to start checking out BC’s south-east area. We drove up to Fernie Mountain to see the slopes, and checked out the town itself (which looked like a ghost town since they revolve around winter tourism it seems!). We ended up camping farther west than we expected, because the first three campgrounds we went to were full – apparently people were starting their long weekend early! (That, in fact, was when we even realized there was a long weekend ahead). We spent the evening chowing on mac and cheese fortified with cheese sausages and tomatoes, and planning our next few days. Research time is upon us … we had to start figuring out where we wanted to spend the winter!