Wednesday Aug 21 Cloudy & cool Westside Road, Falkland, BC
Boy, we sure enjoyed that outdoor shower yesterday evening. An on-demand propane unit heated the water. It was great.
Okay, so today is moving day. We're heading to our good friends Janet & Dave just south of Clearwater for the coming weekend, so we have a couple of days to get there.
My old friend Freddie, who lives in Westbank, West Kelowna, told me that when he heads north, he takes the Westside Road, up the west side of Lake Okanagan. I thought that sounded much better than fighting the gawd awful traffic of Kelowna.
Of course, I did not realize how far north Hwy 33 (where the RV park was) as it relates to Kelowna itself. So, it took a few minutes this morning to "go with the flow" of morning rush hour to the bridge across the lake and then turn off onto Westside Road. It's been decades since we drove this road; I think it was when we were looking to get out of the lower mainland many decades ago, we drove to Fintry. Back then there was not much anywhere along Westside. Not true any more as you will see.
Westside Road twists and turns as it makes its way north to just outside Vernon. There are quite a few stretches of twisty, narrow sections and others where work has been done to improve the road.
Here are some pictures...
The views across the lake are very pretty. Too bad the clouds made the views look a little dull.
And then, out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere we come upon this...La Casa.
We continued on our way up Westside Road.
Eventually we continued onto Hwy 97. We still hadn't had morning coffee so when we got to Falkland, and saw a café, we stopped for lunch. Then, it started raining; first rain we've had in a long time when we're driving.
Jen had made a note of a couple of provincial parks just a short distance along the highway after we left Falkland. We didn't see any signs for Monte Lake P.P. so we continued on looking for Monte Creek P.P. In "downtown" Monte Creek, at the junction of Hwy 97 and Hwy 1, at the end of a dead end road (Monte Creek is very small!), we did a Google search. Turns out Monte Creek P.P. is just a protected area—doesn't even have a day use area.
Well, no choice, we continued into Kamloops. We turned north onto the Yellowhead (Hwy 5) and turned off onto the Pinantan Lake road. We climbed into the hills headed for Paul Lake P.P. We stayed here last year on our college tour.
Quite a change in the weather, 33C in Kelowna yesterday, 19C at Paul Lake today. By the looks of the forecast, the hot temperatures are being replaced with more moderate ones—early to mid 20s for the coming week,
We're here for 2 nights. Tomorrow, Thursday, we're just going to lay low and let Jen recharge her batteries. While she really enjoyed seeing Myra Canyon, bobbing along the trail did take a toll on her bod.
So join us Friday when we head north to Clearwater.
See you then.
Sometimes we wondered if we were on a major road or ??
