Stops #16 to #20 – Tony

The Canadialand tour continues!

We left Kelowna dragging our feet, but there were wines to be enjoyed and more places to see. #storyoftheyear   … wait, not that lame band from high school, try #storyofourtrip

We had a few excellent winery recommendations just north of town which we had to stop by.

From there it was off to… yeah ummm, we don’t know where we are going. Tony spent some time looking online while Jess was driving. We got a couple ideas for places near Nakusp, but we weren’t sure if they would work. FreeCampsites.net has been our biggest help in Canada so far, and there was one site just south of Nakusp that looked to be perfect… so long as the water in the lake is low enough to expose some beach. We’ll just have to drive there to find out!

These lakes are different from anything either of us have ever seen. They all generally run north-south, are hundreds of miles long, and only a mile wide. Glaciers are the coolest! The highway just dead-ends into the lake and you wait for the small ferry to come back in 20 mins.

Stop #16:  Burton, BC (near Nakusp)

In the words of the great Mick Jagger, you can’t always get what you want. The lake was indeed too high. With the sun going down over the beautiful rockies, we felt like we didn’t have much of a choice but to pay for the last remaining site in the town campground (booo!!!). But they had showers and flush toilets (yaaaay!!!!).

Tony went swimming just before sundown (because he’s super adventurous) and Jess watched from the beach (because she’s boring).  Standard camp refrain: cook dinner, play cards, go to bed. Tomorrow is an early rise to head to Revelstoke!

We took a brief tour through Nakusp (cool town!!), and a ferry ride back to the west side.

Stop #17:  Revelstoke, BC

Before we headed into town, we went to scout a free campsite just north. The short of it was that Jess got to off-road Snowball a bit, and we decided to look elsewhere. We arrived in Revy just in time for lunch. So it’s straight to a park near downtown along the river: stir fry on the grill and lazy under the awning.

Right as we finished lunch, a city employee maintaining the park drives up and starts asking about our awning and tent. Perfect timing for a local campsite recommendation!

We drove up past the dam and just like he said there were a few pullouts with access to the lake. The one we chose just so happened to have a little inlet where the water was warm.

We had a few visitors over the next two days; apparently we were directed to a local favorite. There was a log laid over a stump as a ‘diving board’ and that provided a few hours of entertainment! Got to talking with a few cool folks and made camp friends. Seriously amazing campsite, words can’t do it justice. Now we totally understand how people come to Revelstoke and never leave: they get “RevelStuck”.

Stop #18:  Golden, BC

Some awesome pics of the road to Golden! Now we’re definitely in the Canadian Rockies!

Howdy folks! Welcome to Golden  … British Columbia. Since we still call Golden CO home, once we saw that there was a Golden BC, we just had to go. [Funny side note, there’s actually a few CO/BC names in common: Silverton, New Denver, Radium Hot Springs]

This was a fun day. We found an older logging road up near the ski hill where we could camp pretty early in the day, so we drove back into town, toured around on the bikes, and ate dinner. We took the quick drive back up the hill to our campsite and settled in for the night.

[que dark and ominous background music] … That is when our problems began. They came out just before sundown while we were playing cards in the tent. We didn’t notice in time. Hundreds, nay, thousands! Mosquitoes, all of them. It was like a zombie apocalypse movie.  We thought “they’ll go away once the sun is down”. Wrong. We thought “as the night gets colder they’ll go away.” Wrong. Up until now, we hadn’t experienced serious bugs so we didn’t know that we needed to tape up the couple small holes where the poles go in and where the tent folds. We were taught that lesson one bite-slap at a time.

Sleepless nights and bug bites all around. When the sun came up, we made a game-plan and executed it a quickly as possible: GTFO!!! (parents, that’s millennial-speak for pack up and leave) Into town for some coffee. Here’s the resulting ‘bent but unbroken’ post.

We decided “never again”, bought some tuck tape (yay, Canada!), mosquito candles that yes, we use in the tent, and yes, we know it’s a fire hazard, and headed to a real campground south of town.  We needed some damn luxury, okay?

Stop #19:  Golden, BC round 2

This place was a good reprieve from the bugs last night. They had laundry machines, and we were lazy, so it was an easy afternoon.

If you’re not in the mood for lazy, this place had hang gliding and tours and other fun stuff for the adventure seekers.

Needless to say, we slept well that night!

Stop #20:  Invermere, BC

Up early and off to Radium Hot Springs. We found the area to be relatively touristy, so not much in the way of cheap/free camping. So back to freecampsites.net for Tony, and pretty soon we found ourselves 4x4ing around a little lake in the hills west of Invermere.

This was a pretty place, but the secret was not well kept. We arrived on a Saturday, so there were lots of weekenders. We decided to stay through Monday and most of them cleared out. Oddly enough, the specific spot where we made camp seemed to be the only place on the lake that didn’t have a ton of bugs. To paraphrase a wiser man than myself, sometimes you eat the bugs, sometimes the bugs eat you.

Now the wolf we heard, on the other hand, stayed well away and didn’t eat any of us. He howled off and on both nights we stayed, and for some reason it didn’t bother us at all. It was eerily reassuring to know he was out there looking for his buddies.

Morning came and it was off to the parks of the great Canadian Rockies!