On August 15/09, the three of us flew back out to BC. Our plan all along had been to meet the moving truck in Ontario and get somewhat unpacked and settled in. Then fly back out to pick up Keith's pickup truck and our tent trailer and drive through the western provinces (make it our big summer camping trip) back to Ontario. We have never driven...always flown back and forth. We figured it was time we saw some Canadian provinces!
My camera was broken. So I have absolutely no photos of anything that we did while we were in Vancouver. We spent about 3 days there before driving over to Kelowna. Visited friends - Greg & Terri, The Richardson Family, Larry & Sabrina and Ailish, Nuala and Daira. We went to The Bridge (our old church) on Sunday morning. Spent part of a day in Whistler and did the peak-to-peak experience as well as some mini-golfing, luge, yummy dining, and Max did some reverse bungee jumping! Of course...no photos to prove it though. Crazy as it sounds, in my mind if I don't have photos, it didn't really happen. I'm having a really hard time remembering what we all did at this point.
Monday night we drove over to Kelowna. Arrived late in the evening. We had pre-arranged to pick up our tent trailer after hours at the RV Service Place. Unfortunately, when we picked it up, we noticed our battery was missing. Not much we could do that night. We drove to our campground which was kind of a hole-in-the-wall place (but we left booking until the last minute so what else can you do?!) and set up in the dark and lived without our battery that night.
Tuesday we went out for a delicious breakfast at De Dutch and then Keith went back to the RV place to find out what was up with our battery. He dropped me off at The Future Shop to check out cameras. We met up about an hour later. The RV place gave him a free battery. About a week ago someone came through at night and stole all the batteries off the RV's in their lot which is how ours ended up missing. I had found a camera so I let him wheel and deal with the sales guy while I took Max for a walk. By noon we were done and heading over to Ben Lee Splash Park. Where we met up with a whole bunch of our Kelowna friends for an afternoon of fun and playtime.
I snapped this of Max as we were driving away after saying goodbye to our friends. Lost in thought...
From there we drove to a peach orchard and bought some fresh ripe peaches. Yummy! You can sure buy a lot of peaches for $5.00 when you are buying directly from the orchard stands. We were well stocked. We made a quick little drive-by trip back to our house to check it out. Our neighbours were outside so we got out and chatted with themfor a while. Hit Panago for dinner that night. Max had a gift certificate from Tennis camp and he suggested that he would "take us out for dinner". Wasn't that sweet? (He also wanted to take Grandpa and Grandma, Jesse and Heather and Vanessa too...unfortunately I don't think the $10 would have gone quite far enough. Maybe enough for a bite for each of us!)
The next morning, we got up early, packed everything up and hit the road.
In my mind, this is when we officially moved.
We had hundreds and thousands of miles ahead of us to drive. And a little 5 year old boy in the backseat. How do you keep him entertained day after day? We did what any sane parent would do. Went to Walmart. Stocked up on a whole bunch of never before seen (by him) movies. The rule was that he was allowed to watch "one new movie" each day. And if he watched a movie in the morning then he couldn't watch a movie in the afternoon. So he soon figured out that it was best to hold out and wait to watch his movies in the afternoon. The mornings went by quite fast anyway....it was the afternoons that could tend to drag sometimes. This was a fairly common sight when we looked in the seat behind us as we were driving along...
We actually found an espresso hut in BC. I've talked about these before. They are all over the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Northern California). We were elated to find one in BC! 
Max was thoroughly entertained by the blow-up green giant guy that was in front of the espresso hut. He thought it was definitely worthy of a photo and requested that I take one. Here it is...
When we do roadtrips, we often stop for picnic lunches. We bought one of those koolatron plug-in coolers a few years back. One of the best investments ever. We take it with us in the back of the truck and keep lunch meats and salads and fruits and drinks in there. They stay cool. We can stop for picnics when we're hungry and we don't get sick of eating out at restaurants. Here we stopped alongside the hwy for our first picnic lunch of the trip:
A short little hike brought us to this cute little picnic spot:
Max enjoying dessert - a fresh okanagan peach we had bought a day earlier. YUM!
Driving through Cranbrook... I took the next couple of pictures for my mom. Her brother moved there about a year ago and I knew she'd enjoy seeing what the scenery looked like in his corner of the world.
We killed an awful lot of bugs on our roadtrip. The windshield is actually pretty clean at this point...
Sparwood is the last town in BC before you get to the Alberta border. While Keith filled the truck with gas, Max and I wandered over to check out the "The Biggest Truck in the World". It was impressively big! :-) See how tiny Max looks standing in front of the last tire on the right?
And then we hit the provincial border. I was so busy turning around in my seat to take a picture of the BC sign that I totally missed the Alberta sign. Oh well.
Just inside the Alberta border, we drove through the Frank Slide. If I can remember correctly, it occured in the early 1900's. Part of a mountain gave way during the night and killed 70 people. This photo was taken on the right side of the road where the slide would have started.
And these next two photos were taken on the left side of the hwy. You can see how much rock must have given away...it covered a huge area.
And that concludes BC. Next post will be about our time spent in Waterton National Park in Alberta.
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