Over the Mountains

Sunday, May 3 – Pulled out of Calgary at about 8:45 local time and after a short time we were into the mountains; always quite a sight for prairie people.  Not much traffic so we made very good time.  We pulled off at Lac des Arcs just outside of Banff National Park.  A young woman pointed out an osprey hunting over the lake.  We chatted with her and her husband for a few minutes and we were soon under way again.

Further down the road inside Banff National Park we stopped at a large turnout to take some pictures. A car drove up beside us and to our surprise it was the same couple that we had met  earlier.  We found out at this time that they weren’t from “around here”.  Tracy and Liam were from England and were visiting the mountains for 8 days.  Tracy is going back to school to become a wildlife biologist after giving up her career as an accountant, She was very excited about the abundance of wildlife; getting Liam to stop the car every few miles so she could take pictures and explore.   They seemed very interested in our trip to Alaska so we gave them one of our travelling cards and they said that they would follow our trip when they returned home.

Canmore, AB is bustling with condominium construction and there seems to be a lot of road construction going on between Banff and Lake Louise.  They are twinning the highway here and creating wildlife overpasses and underpasses to minimize interactions between the animals and vehicles.

There is still lots of snow in the mountains, ridges of ice along streams and rivers, but there is definitely signs of spring everywhere – we stopped at the visitor centre in Field, BC, where it was reported that grizzly bear footprints had recently been seen behind the town site.  We encountered our first real rainfall when we were going through the Rogers Pass.  It seems that the last time we went through here in 2003 that we also encountered rain.  In Revlestoke, we stopped for lunch and a quick refuelling.  The trees here are really “leafing out”, the grass is turning green and of course the dandelions are in full bloom.

We took BC 97 South, through Sicamous and Lake Mara.  Sicamous is apparently the “Houseboat Capital of Canada” – who knew?    This area is heavily agricultural and there were many farmers preparing their fields.  As we approached the northern end of Okanagan Lake there was a big change in the weather; the temperature reached 21 C.  and the bedding plant nurseries were absolutely mobbed with traffic.  We continued through Kelowna, Westbank and arrived at  Todd’s RV Park,  just north of Peachland at approx 5:15 PM, PDT.

Todd’s RV Campground is just beautiful.  We wanted full service so we were parked towards the back of the park in site # 50.  There are several sites along Beach Avenue that have electrical and water only but have a spectacular, unobstructed view of Lake Okanagan about 30 yards away.  These sites are fairly short and would not accommodate our trailer. 

We just got settled when Kevin drove up to our site.  He had arrived just a few hours before us having spent a couple of nights at Lake Louise in a hostel.  We were able to move all of his belongings out of our trailer and into his apartment.  With all that weight out of the trailer we should get much better fuel economy.  (I would guess that he packed close to 100 pounds of free weights into our trailer plus a lot of his clothes and books.) And all the additional floor space will be appreciated as well.