Alberta Bound

No service where we are...even very spotty cellular service.  We've headed into a town for some groceries, so I'm updating this blog on the way.

We left Golden, BC, yesterday morning around 10 am, continuing east.  It's a really nice drive through Yoho Nat'l Park through the Kicking Horse Canyon.

It was impossible to get a decent shot of the canyon.  No way to convey the depth.  But it's deep.  I know there's a mountain behind that cloud.

Again, such beautiful scenery.

And we climb to the Kicking Horse Pass and the continental divide into Alberta!  It was so funny seeing the Kicking Horse River flow toward us on one side, then the Bow River flow with us on the other side.

We went by Lake Louise and Banff.  We've been there before, and it was pretty busy.  Having the RV along has its challenges and it was just a pain to go into either.  So we thought, "some other time".  It didn't bug us too much.  This is Mt. Rundle at Banff.

And this is the "Three Sisters" near Canmore.

We arrived at Elkton Valley Campground around 3pm and set up.  Andy Jackson came along around 5 or so.  He was doing a Search and Rescue Training course (he was the trainer).  We had a few and chatted for about 4 hours or so.  Then he went off to his RV.  His wife is at home in Red Deer doing some things, but will be out today.  We have a get-together planned with some old friends, who also live in Red Deer.  More on that tomorrow.

I won't be able to do a blog tonight either.  Just no service, so I'll update it on the way to Cochrane.

Columbia Valley

It was a beautiful morning this morning.  We set off south down the Columbia Valley for Radium Hot Springs.  It wasn't so much to go into the hot springs, as we've done that before, but it was only about an hour away, and we could see some of the valley as we went.  Like this.

The Columbia River follows a fairly straight path down, but there are lots of little side currents that run along with it, so there are marshes and wetlands all the way down.

One stop I had in mind was in Edgewater, almost at Radium.  I have a great-uncle buried there.  He was my grandmother's brother.  So we checked that out.  It's a small little cemetery in the town.

Then we went on to Radium Hot Springs.  I remember being there 28 years ago, and swimming with the girls.  I think David was too little to go in.  He would have only been 1 year old.

On the way out of Kootenay Nat'l Park is this rock cut.  Beautiful shot.

Then we saw this...well, we just had to try it.  We were hungry, after all.

We timed it right as it rained all the way back to Golden, where we picked up a few things, including gassing up before we set off tomorrow morning.

By the time we were back, it was after 3, and I needed to do some laundry.  So I did that, and we enjoyed a crockpot dinner, and a game of Cribbage before retiring for the night.  There's no TV here, so we just read, and plan our next few days.  We're teeing up time with Dave while we're in Alberta.  He's in Bragg Creek right now.

So tomorrow, we're done with B.C.  It's been great - almost 2 weeks in B.C.

Beautiful British Columbia

First of all, our trailer hitch issue has been resolved.  We had to replace the unit.  They expect the post was probably bent, which prevented the motor from retracting it any further.  I guess that can happen with this kind of weight, and there are a few different ways it could have happened.

When we got up, we waited for phone calls from a couple of different places we had contacted.  The closest to us was in Salmon Arm.  Anything after that would have meant we wouldn't have unhitched, which would have restricted us :(  Long story short, the Salmon Arm dealer had the unit and would change it for us as soon as we arrived.  We had to backtrack about half an hour, but it was worth it.

Once that was all done, we were on our way again.

This country of ours is absolutely gorgeous, and of course, BC and Alberta have the stunning mountains to admire.  Our drive was from Salmon Arm to Golden, BC.  In that stretch, we drove through Mt. Revelstoke Nat'l Park and Glacier Nat'l Park (the Canadian one).  Everywhere you look, it's absolutely beautiful.  These are taken as we're driving along.

I have lots more too, but I won't bore you.  I like this sign.  Kinda says it all, eh?  Watch for a mountain goat standing on a rock.

We drove through several tunnels.

Fortunately, it's not that time of year!

But they slid down these slopes in the recent past.

Rogers Pass is the summit in Glacier Nat'l Park on the TransCanada Highway.

We also went through a time change just before leaving Glacier Nat'l Park.  We're now on Mountain Time.  We arrived in Golden around 3:45 MDT.

After we set up, we went off to find the Golden Community Cemetery.  My great-grandmother is buried here.  My grandmother (on my mother's side) grew up in this area and just south of here.  This is her grave, kind of all by itself, on the side of quite a steep hill within the cemetery grounds.  Took us a bit of searching to find it.

You can't see it, but there are several others in those trees in the background, and just behind where I'm standing.  She died in 1918, just before my grandmother married my grandfather, whom she met in this area.

We went back to our RV and on the way, just down the road from us, is a look-out over Golden.  You can barely see the Kicking Horse River in the foreground, behind the trees.  Beautiful colour.

Golden is in the Rocky Mountain Trench and the Columbia River flows through it.  The Kicking Horse River flows into the Columbia River near here.

We're here for a couple of days and plan on driving down through the trench tomorrow.

Moving on - Now in Sicamous

Betcha never heard of it.  We left Hope on this beautiful morning.  This is a view from behind our RV.  Not sure if it's Mt. Hope, or not.

We climbed a lot today.  So we're not far from those clouds in this pic.  We started out at 14C in the morning, and it got down to 6C because of our climb.

Here's some down, then up.  You can see how much drier it is here.

Just beautiful scenery most of the way.

So we arrived at our RV park around 2 pm.  We do have a problem with our hitch jack though.  This morning when we left we could only get it up to just above the bottom of the hitch part that's attached to the truck.  So that's a good thing.  But now we're afraid to put it down in case it won't go up at all.  Then we'd be stuck.  We didn't unhitch tonight (we don't usually for one-nighters anyway), but we do usually put the jack down.  Fortunately, it was a pretty level spot, so we just left it on the truck as is.

We're trying a place in Salmon Arm to see if they can fix it tomorrow.  We have to call them in the morning.  If so, we'll go back there (about 45 km).  If not, then we'll head to Golden as planned and take it from there.  Worst case scenario, we leave it hitched up and see if we can get it fixed in Calgary.  We tried the manual jack.  It won't budge past where it is now.  One guy said it could be bent.  Ugh.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Hope

Hope, as in the town of Hope.  At the base of Mt. Hope.

We left Campbell River this morning around 8 am to catch the ferry from Nanaimo (Discovery Bay) to Vancouver (Horseshoe Bay).  Here we are in line at the ferry terminal.



And on board.



A view of Vancouver from the ferry.  Just a tad overcast though.

When we got off the ferry, we drove through West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Vancouver, and a whole whack of cities on the lower mainland - Burnaby, Coquitlam, Surrey, and I don't even know what else.  Lots of independent cities.  It's certainly a busy area.  This is the Port Mann Bridge over the Fraser River in Surrey.  A toll bridge, I might add.

Driving along heading toward the Cascade Mountains.  The greater Vancouver area is a low flatland due to the delta of the Fraser River.  But as we approach the mountains, there is farmland surrounded by mountains.  What a beautiful spot to live.

We arrived at our destination, Hope, around 2:30.  Nice little spot.  When you look out the window above the trees, you expect to see sky.  But not here.  You see the wall of a mountain.  And mountains are all around us.  There was a landslide here near the town in the 1960s where 4 people lost their lives.

We went for a relatively short hike to Flood Falls.  You can barely see it running down this mountain (bottom 1/3 of the photo).

Here it is while we're standing at the foot of it.

While walking through the forest to get to the falls, we saw these trees covered in moss.  All the rain, I guess.

 Another mountain as we walked back to our RV park.

We would love to be driving up the Trans Canada Highway through the Fraser River canyon tomorrow to Kamloops, but with the RV we're not going to do that.  It's a sort of crazy, scary drive in a car let alone having an RV behind us, even though it's beautiful.  We're going to take Hwy 5 instead and meet the TC there.  Looking forward to the drive (don't know about Gerard).

Lots to Do on the Island

We got up today to a nice, fairly clear, morning.  But we knew we had to get our hiking in before the rain, because it was on its way.

So we went out to Elk Falls Provincial Park.  It is not far from our RV park, and right next to the power plant, and these big culverts run from the river to the plant for power generation.  We're standing on a bridge over the culverts, and on a path to the river.

Here is Elk Falls.

And lEk Falls from the suspension bridge.

The suspension bridge was just completed last year.

After we were done here, we went off on a trail down toward the power plant which ran for about a km and a half, or so.  Another one of those big slugs.

And big trees.

Nice path though.

Before we were finished, the rain started, and it was coming down pretty good.  Fortunately, we took our umbrellas along.  We're sure glad we did.

It did clear up later for a while.  We went out for a short walk.  Just up the road from us is an Indian cemetery.  Interesting.



This is our last night on Vancouver Island.  So we decided we'd go out for dinner.  We really haven't done that the whole time we've been away.  We went to the Harbour Grill, just down the road from where we are.  It was recommended to us.  Wonderful restaurant, with a great view.  I mentioned we're on the route of the Alaska cruise ships' inside passage.  Here's the MS Volendam, a Holland America Line ship, heading south, right outside our restaurant window!

There's lots to do on this Island, but not enough time!  Tomorrow we head back across to the mainland, and start our eastward trek home, with a few stops in-between.

Campbell River

This morning we packed up and left around 9:30 to head back over to the east side of Vancouver Island.  Back over that twisty, turny road.  This was taken kind of behind as we were flying by.

This is Cathedral Grove again...that area where you can walk among the huge trees and where they're so close to the road.

We arrived in Campbell River around 1:30, got all set up while the weather was quite nice -- sunny and warm, then it started to rain.  It rained for quite a while, so we watched the Blue Jays.  The rain let up, so we thought we would head out for a bit of a walk around.  We're on a spit that makes up one side of the mouth of the Campbell River.  The ocean side is the Tyee Pool where you can only catch fish with a manually-propelled boat, and with no modern lures or devices of any kind.  We'd never seen a sign like this before, but then, we're not around harbours and the like that often.

We're standing on the end of the spit here, looking up the Campbell River.

A nice serene place.  The ocean side is part of the Georgia Strait between the mainland and the Island.  The Alaska cruise ships go right by us, apparently, on the inside passage.  We'll see if we see any.

Well, it started raining again, and it's supposed to go on all night.  Kind of dreary, just like the Blue Jays game.