June 27, 2015

What happened…

Andrew writes:Brookmere is a strange town..village..hamlet? We stopped to ask for water at one house last night before dinner and came away with two 500ml bottles, and a can of beer; success? I walked up to another house and knocked on the door and a woman started talking at me from behind it, afraid to open it? Must be the smell. In any event, this morning our only interaction was from a woman who had lost her dog. Nope, haven’t seen it.

As we were camped on the KVR, we rode it along for as long as we could until eventually, after maybe 10km we came to where a trestle HAD been. Before us stood a mount of dirt that we didn’t feel like pushing up, or a forest service road. Let’s go this way I asserted, and we set out on the FSR, because truth be told, the Kettle Valley Railway trail isn’t a heck of a lot of fun. It’s flat, but it’s full of gravel, sand, and washboard surface.

After about 2km of riding along the FSR, we stopped to talk to a car with some Scots in it, telling us all about the Outer Hebrides. Did they cycle there? Oh no, it would be miserable. Anyways, at this point I consulted our map, and turned around, admitting defeat to Amanda, who it turns out may have been more right than I was about which direction we should have been riding for the last 2km. It’s all good in the end, the road would it’s way up, down, and around the Otter Valley walls, and we stopped in at Otter Lake for lunch.

I suppose if there hadn’t been so many powerboats, or other campers we might have called it a day early, but we were still 6km away from Tulameen and we didn’t have a lot of options left for food. We rode into Tulameen and re-stocked some of our supplies at the general store. It was there, as I sat outside the general store with Amanda, drinking beer, in the sweltering heat, next to a pack of kids eating ice cream, that I felt like a bit of a…transient? Hobo? Outsider? After 8 months in Latin America, I had forgotten about drinking in public in Canada. Here we were, stinky, sweaty, unkempt cyclists, swilling Molson’s finest lager outside of an ice cream parlour. Oh, the humanity! If this is what it feels like to be an outsider, then this is the life for me. Stay gold Ponyboy, stay gold.

We learned from the locals that the KVR was washed out ahead, virtually impassable. So that put us on the road. It was nice and paved, and climbed a few hundred meters up out of the valley and then shot us down into Princeton. It’s strange, yet, as I peered down the 300 vertical meters to the valley floor and saw the KVR wind it’s way along the river bank, I yearned to be riding it. It looked like such a nice route. Too bad about the rockslide.

We pulled into Princeton around 1630hrs, and quickly set-up shop at the Dairy Queen. We enjoyed air conditioning, ice cream, wi-fi, and filled most of our water containers. I was dismayed to learn that there are no Warmshowers hosts in Princeton, so we just decided to ride out along the Kettle Valley Railway and find a spot to pitch our tent. Just before Rainbow Lake, home of the Castle Resort, we found just such a spot. It was late, probably 2030hrs by the time dinner was ready, and the tent set up.

We were laying in the tent, sans fly, reading books, watching the stars come out, listening to someones boombox down at the campground below us, when we heard a rustling in the grass. Amanda scrambled to find the bear-spray. False alarm, just a deer. Strangely, the deer didn’t seem too bothered by our presence. Several deer wandered around our campsite, doing whatever it is that deer do, (shit in the woods?) and then we lost interest and fell asleep.

Amanda writes:I enjoyed the ride today as it was not the highway. Memories of the Coquihalla highway are still fresh in my mind and I’m not in any rush to ride that road again. The Trans Canada Trail section that we did ride was a bit rough, but better than the big highway. As a bonus when we were in Princeton we saw an old friend; how random! Andrew was paying for groceries and I was looking at a newspaper box and I hear from behind me “Amanda?”. It was Christine and Carleton; friends through our good friends Mike and Kim. What are the chances? They were actually enroute to camp near Kamloops but the Coquihalla was closed due to an accident so they re-routed through Princeton. As it so happens they were on their way to camp with Kim & Mike. It really is a small world.

Today’s Photographs

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