The West Coast Part 1: The Drive Out
Well, now that I'm back and settled back in and caught up on work I can finally take a bit of time ot let everybody know how our vacation to BC was. We left on Friday Sept 8, and got home Monday Sept 18, so I guess we were gone for a little while. It was really a great trip, I do have to say I think September is the perfect time to travel in Canada. You are past the big tourist season, so you miss the crowds, bad traffic, and high season costs at hotels and stuff, yet the weather is still pretty great, for the most part anyway. At least it's not sweltering hot.
Friday we took off from Lloydminster and travelled as far as Edmonton and stayed there for the night at Don's parents' place. We got up nice and early Saturday morning with the intention of getting an early start, but when you are staying with family that's usually not likely to happen, lol. We got away at a decent time though. We packed our own snacks and drinks to cut down on cost and time spent stopping, it worked out pretty good. We drove to Jasper from Edmonton and stopped there for a mid afternoon lunch, unfortunatley it was getting pretty windy and rainy, so our idea to stop and have a nice little picnic was out. Instead we settled for eating in the car in some random parking lot, oh well. Carrying on through the Rockies the weather got pretty nasty with lots of sudden heavy rainstorms, thus, cancelling out any of the other sight seeing plans we had, no worries though, we can always go back to the Rockies.
Due to the crappy weather and our lack of stopping to sight see, we made excellent time on Saturday and made it all the way to Kamloops,BC. Then we got lost in Kamloops for nearly two hours looking for a hotel, I guess we just took the scenic route :). Neither of us had really been out there before though, so it wasn't that surprising that we ended up a bit lost at times. Don was there when he was a kid, but of course that was a long time ago and it's not like he paid attention to where his parents were driving either. But we did eventually find the hotel district and with the help of our handy tour guide books found a really nice place for a good price. I recommend the Comfort Inn the anyone travelling through Kamloops nice clean cozy hotel with all the amenities plus a sweet continental breakfast in the morning. The first thing we did was go for a nice long soak in the hot tub, it felt great after all that travelling.
The next morning we got a good early start and headed out again. I have to say that the Okanagan is not what I expected, it's a lot nicer than I had pictured in my head. Everything is nicely nestled in these cozy little valleys with huge rolling hills, beautiful lakes and cute little streams everywhere, it's gorgeous!!! I'd love to go back to BC one day and just spend time in the interior, there are so many neat things to do there, like wine tours and house boating. Anyway, we stopped in the town of Armstrong for lunch and went to the Village Cheese Company, I had read about this place on the internet and being a big fan of cheese it was on my list of places to stop . It was pretty cool, you could try all the differnt cheeses that they made there. We took a couple bricks of our favorites with us as well. A funny story about our stop in Armstrong, we took the turn into the town too soon and ened up on this really windy hilly backroad, it was actually really pretty, there were all these cornfields and little farms, so sometimes detours are ok :).
From there we contunued through the Okanagan passing through Vernon and we got to Kelowna and decided to stop for a bit of a break. We found a nice city park down by the Okanagan Lake and went for a nice relaxing walk to stretch our legs. I even got a dorky picture with the "Ogopogo", Okanagan Lake's version of Nessie, lol. We wandered around the park for a couple of hours just enjoying the scenery and the nice day, then we decided we better get back on the road. It was a bit disappointing while we were driving that I couldn't get a lot of nice pictures, there was hardly anywhere to pull over on the highways to stop, you'd be driving along and see a nice view and then in 2 seconds it's gone! So a lot of pictures were taken through the car window, I'm still not sure how well they turned out as we haven't even sat down to look through them yet. Oh well we know what we saw I guess.
Kelowna is really the last major city beofre you get to Vancouver so we decided to just keep on driving and get to Don's Grandma's in Maple Ridge that night. (Maple Ridge is right outside of Vancouver) We rolled into Maple Ridge at about 8:00 that night and found his grandma's house with no problems. We sat up for a little while and visited but we were pretty burned out and it wasn't long befor we hit the hay, we decided we'd figure out the rest of our vacation in the morning.
Well, now that I'm back and settled back in and caught up on work I can finally take a bit of time ot let everybody know how our vacation to BC was. We left on Friday Sept 8, and got home Monday Sept 18, so I guess we were gone for a little while. It was really a great trip, I do have to say I think September is the perfect time to travel in Canada. You are past the big tourist season, so you miss the crowds, bad traffic, and high season costs at hotels and stuff, yet the weather is still pretty great, for the most part anyway. At least it's not sweltering hot.
Friday we took off from Lloydminster and travelled as far as Edmonton and stayed there for the night at Don's parents' place. We got up nice and early Saturday morning with the intention of getting an early start, but when you are staying with family that's usually not likely to happen, lol. We got away at a decent time though. We packed our own snacks and drinks to cut down on cost and time spent stopping, it worked out pretty good. We drove to Jasper from Edmonton and stopped there for a mid afternoon lunch, unfortunatley it was getting pretty windy and rainy, so our idea to stop and have a nice little picnic was out. Instead we settled for eating in the car in some random parking lot, oh well. Carrying on through the Rockies the weather got pretty nasty with lots of sudden heavy rainstorms, thus, cancelling out any of the other sight seeing plans we had, no worries though, we can always go back to the Rockies.
Due to the crappy weather and our lack of stopping to sight see, we made excellent time on Saturday and made it all the way to Kamloops,BC. Then we got lost in Kamloops for nearly two hours looking for a hotel, I guess we just took the scenic route :). Neither of us had really been out there before though, so it wasn't that surprising that we ended up a bit lost at times. Don was there when he was a kid, but of course that was a long time ago and it's not like he paid attention to where his parents were driving either. But we did eventually find the hotel district and with the help of our handy tour guide books found a really nice place for a good price. I recommend the Comfort Inn the anyone travelling through Kamloops nice clean cozy hotel with all the amenities plus a sweet continental breakfast in the morning. The first thing we did was go for a nice long soak in the hot tub, it felt great after all that travelling.
The next morning we got a good early start and headed out again. I have to say that the Okanagan is not what I expected, it's a lot nicer than I had pictured in my head. Everything is nicely nestled in these cozy little valleys with huge rolling hills, beautiful lakes and cute little streams everywhere, it's gorgeous!!! I'd love to go back to BC one day and just spend time in the interior, there are so many neat things to do there, like wine tours and house boating. Anyway, we stopped in the town of Armstrong for lunch and went to the Village Cheese Company, I had read about this place on the internet and being a big fan of cheese it was on my list of places to stop . It was pretty cool, you could try all the differnt cheeses that they made there. We took a couple bricks of our favorites with us as well. A funny story about our stop in Armstrong, we took the turn into the town too soon and ened up on this really windy hilly backroad, it was actually really pretty, there were all these cornfields and little farms, so sometimes detours are ok :).
From there we contunued through the Okanagan passing through Vernon and we got to Kelowna and decided to stop for a bit of a break. We found a nice city park down by the Okanagan Lake and went for a nice relaxing walk to stretch our legs. I even got a dorky picture with the "Ogopogo", Okanagan Lake's version of Nessie, lol. We wandered around the park for a couple of hours just enjoying the scenery and the nice day, then we decided we better get back on the road. It was a bit disappointing while we were driving that I couldn't get a lot of nice pictures, there was hardly anywhere to pull over on the highways to stop, you'd be driving along and see a nice view and then in 2 seconds it's gone! So a lot of pictures were taken through the car window, I'm still not sure how well they turned out as we haven't even sat down to look through them yet. Oh well we know what we saw I guess.
Kelowna is really the last major city beofre you get to Vancouver so we decided to just keep on driving and get to Don's Grandma's in Maple Ridge that night. (Maple Ridge is right outside of Vancouver) We rolled into Maple Ridge at about 8:00 that night and found his grandma's house with no problems. We sat up for a little while and visited but we were pretty burned out and it wasn't long befor we hit the hay, we decided we'd figure out the rest of our vacation in the morning.
posted by Reagan | 1:38 PM
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