For more photos look at these sets: The drive from Harrison Lake to Kamloops, Kamloops, Okanagan Lake and Harrison Lake
When I think of Canadian landscapes I picture huge snow covered mountains, vast lakes and never-ending pine trees. Imagine my surprise to find myself in a Canadian desert. Kamloops is a town of 100,000 or so a few hours North-East of Vancouver. It is famous for its hot summers (several days over 40 usually) and the number of sunny days per year. In comparison to most of Canada it is the Bahamas but still, it gets a bitterly cold in winter. Unlike a lot of deserts, Kamloops is not short of water. Even if it doesn’t rain much there the rivers still flow strongly through town fed by the copious rainfall elsewhere. Ironically, after days and days of unprecedented warm weather and sunshine, we had our first cloudy and drizzly Canadian day in Kamloops.
We were there visiting Sarah’s Uncle Mike and Aunt Maureen (plus thier cat Lucky). They had just returned from riding their Harleys to Sturgis (minus the cat, although I’m sure lucky would have enjoyed it). Sturgis is a Harley festival with around 750,000 attendees and located in South Dakota, 1200 miles from Kamloops. Mike and Mo ride their Harleys there and back. All we did was sit on the Harleys in the garage and rev them up but that alone was enough to get the old motorcycle juices flowing.
The hot summer continued the next day when we headed down to Lake Okanagan to visit family friends. It’s another hot and dry landscape but with a massive 135km long lake running through the otherwise dry looking valley. It was a beautiful day to be taken by speed boat to the other side of the lake for lunch and some of the tastiest prawns I’ve eaten. The houses at Naramata on Okanagan Lake were built after a landslide some 50 years ago created this new piece of land next to the lake. You can still see where the hill fell away into the lake. The water walking into the lake from here is very shallow for about 100 metres from shore due to amount of debris that ended up in there.
For more photos look at these sets:
The drive from Harrison Lake to Kamloops
BTW, we have photos of family and friends recorded but don’t really want to plaster them all over the internet without permission so we’ll create a private place for access later.
Also, credit Sarah with most of these shots. She’s very good at stopping to take photos, which while annoying at the time is giving us a great record of our trip.
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