Okanagan sun and swimmin'

Well, we've definitely found summer vacation land! We're currently spending a couple of days in Penticton - a land of sun, peaches, swimming and crowded campgrounds. We arrived here yesterday very ready for a break...one more minute sitting on those seats was simply unthinkable! The past few days have been really beautiful and exciting, but also somewhat challenging.

We left Grand Forks, where Matt last posted, and headed off west towards Greenwood and Midway, still on the Columbia and Western Rail trail. We swam every day in a river or lake and life was simply great. The trail was in pretty good condition, with some soft bits, but all in all we really enjoyed ourselves.

At Midway we got on to the Kettle Valley Railway trail, which was something we had really looked forward to, given how famous it is we figured we'd be riding on a perfect trail through gorgeous terrain. It didn't really turn out that way though! Turns out it's only the 13km section through Myra Canyon (with all the trestles...the ones that burnt in the Okanagan fire and have since been replaced) that is well ridden. The rest of the KVR has been, thus far, a bit underwhelming. Not that it's really bad or anything, but the surface of the trail had often been abysmal, with tons of pockets of loose sand and quite a bit of washboard. The sand just sucks your bike all over and makes forward progress really challenging and the washboard is so hard on your body. My wrists and bum have take quite the pounding over the last few days. We pulled into town here pretty exhausted and are going to take two days to recover.

Some of the scenery has been pretty great, especially travelling right along the beautiful Kettle River and Myra Canyon really is amazing. Some of the trail, however had been more of a logging road, often through clear cuts or scrubby bush. I've been thinking that I probably wouldn't have been disappointed by this section of trail if I hadn't been expecting so much from it. It's really not that different than other parts have been, but when you thing something is going to be great, when it turns out to be good it's hard to be as enthusiastic about it. It makes me realize how amazing a lot of what we have done has been to realize that this "famous" section doesn't top a lot of where we've been.

I should mention that on the day we passed through Myra Canyon we also celebrated our 3rd anniversary, and passed the 1000km mark of the trip. Very exciting indeed!

Yesterday we dropped down from the highlands that seperate the Kettle Valley from the Okanagan and rode down into Naramata. That was definitely a gorgeous ride, especially because we ducked out of the KVR trail a bit early and onto smooth, paved, and very downhill roads! We stopped at a few wineries, ate good food, smelled Ponderosa Pines and sage brush and ended up in Penticton, camping right by Skaha Lake. Today we're swimming as much as possible, eating as much fresh fruit as possible and running errands.

Sorry about the lack of pictures again...I keep forgetting to bring the camera cable with me when we go to libraries and ther haven't been card readers around. I'll post some when I can. There's some pretty nice ones!