Today was a day of surprisingly varied landscape..a travel day today. Here is what I expected. We know we were heading west, crossing the rockies and heading for the coast. So I figured that after a while the mountains would fade and turn to rolling hills and flatten out as we moved west. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The mountains just kept getting larger and larger. Then suddenly we would descend a steep grade and be in a wide flat valley between mountains with farms all around, then back up and into a different kind of mountains, then ‘badlands’ then flats, then lakes, and on and on.
In one of the valleys, in the town of Sicamous, BC we stopped at a place called Fruit World, fresh cherries, apples and all kinds of locally made honey and jams and vinegars and such. We gave up a few more Canadian dollars and got some goodies for the road. I don’t know what kind of apples I got but they were huge, juicy and delicious, a great treat for driving along this morning.
We stopped in the town of Kamloops and found a riverside park along the South Thompson River and fixed lunch. It was nice eating in the park and when we finished Carol went down to the river and put her toes in the cold water. Carol said the water was cold, not Lake Superior cold but cold, and yet, there were people swimming there - young people, all young people. Back on the road we chatted and watched the landscape continue to change and change again.
Carol was reading the guidebooks and reading all of the history of the various towns we were traveling through and she stumbled upon a well concealed Provincial Park, the Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park, which has the remains of an old rail line and the five tunnels through the mountains. They are known as the Othello Tunnels - through solid Granite - the tunnels were completed in 1914 and took three years to dig, then went out of service in 1961 after a major landslide and never reopened. We hiked along where the old rail bed used to be, and through the tunnels. I am so glad Carol found this little know place, it was spectacular.
I am writing this from the town of Chilliwack, our final Canadian destination, tomorrow morning we cross back into the good old USA and on to Portland for a visit with our son Jason, and Kate. We ate at a local restaurant next door and used up every last cent of Canadian money. . .(actually nickel, Canada doesn’t have cents, no pennies here at all). Here is a gallery of even more ‘through the windshield’ shots - Click any image for a larger view.
And one more thing, We passed the 4000 mile mark on this trip today, about 100 miles back, and I am amazed at the gas mileage. I thought for sure that once we hit the mountains our mileage would drop, it actually improved. I guess the steady headwind in the prairie was a great impediment. I reset trip meter B as we entered the mountains just to watch the mileage drop. You can see by the picture here that since I reset the meter we have traveled 721 miles and averaged 32.6 MPG over that span. We are getting well over 500 miles to a tank of gas!. In the prairie we averaged around 29.6 to 30.2. In the 4100 miles we have averaged 30.4, not too bad for a fully loaded car, thanks Subaru.