Kamloops

On the third and final day, we had an open agenda and only a few things to do:

• Check out of the hotel before noon
• Get home before dark (neither of us has great night vision for driving)

First, we tidied up our hotel room and checked out. One thing I forgot to mention in the previous posts is that while the shower was very strong and the water was nice ‘n hot, the drain could not come close to keeping up with the water flow, so showers were more like combo shower/baths because you’d be standing in ankle-deep water by the end. Not optimal, but better than not enough water pressure, I suppose.

We once again dined at McD’s and I had another Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I don’t know what they put in those things, other than the parts in the name, but I have a disturbingly powerful hankering for them.

After breakfast, we decided to return to disc golf–but first we would get some bug spray to fend off the mosquitoes. This led to another debacle using the in-car navigation and just weird bad luck (the Pharmasave we first went to was closed on Sundays. Sorry, people who need prescriptions, you’ll just have to deal!) but I eventually got a can of Deep Woods Off! at a Save-On Foods. Speaking of weird, the guy ahead of me was buying two nags of Tim Hortons coffee (this is such a Canadian entry) and asked if I was just buying the one item. I said yes, and he let me go ahead of him. This was nice, but I mean, unless he was expecting some horrible complication with the coffee, I wouldn’t have had long to wait. Maybe people in Kamloops are just that nice.

With the bug spray secured, we returned to the course, sprayed ourselves liberally (spoiler: It worked!) and set out to play 9 of the 18 holes, cleverly using the app to make sure we played in the right direction and everything. At several points, multiple marmots would gather on the fairway ahead of us, apparently knowing we couldn’t throw far enough to imperil them. And they were right.

I started…poorly (7 shots on one hole) and this let Jeff cruise to a win of 41 to 44. We were 13 and 16 shots over par, so not quite tournament-ready (Kamloops is the “tournament capital of Canada” as noted on multiple signs all over the place). Jeff also won the bonus award of “most discs in the water” at three discs! His were very clean by the end of our round. I put a few in the weeds and one over a fence but managed to stay out of the water. With just a few hundred hours of practise, I could probably get pretty good at this!

I only took a few quick shots on my phone this time, Here’s one looking over the South Thompson River.

After wrapping up the disc golf, we began the trip back. It started to rain shortly after we started up the Coquihalla, but fortunately the rain didn’t persist, and it was partly sunny the rest of the way. The rest of the trip broke down¹This phrase becomes relevant, as you’ll soon find out like so:

• A brief stop at a Dairy Queen in Merritt, for ice cream cones. This is another example of fast food that was strangely yummy. I haven’t had a DQ cone in probably ten years or so.
• Another stop to let Jeff rest at the Coquihalla Summit (elevation around 4000 feet or 1200 meters). Jeff reminded me again how nice it would be if I had my driver’s license again. The pressure is on! I made a vague promise of sorts.
• A stop in Hope just past 4 p.m. to have an early dinner at Home (but not home). Jeff had schnitzel, I opted for the turkey dinner. I ate almost everything before remembering to get a photo of my food. Sorry, Instagram, you’re out of luck this time!
• Traffic moved better than expected once we got out of the mountains, but slowed then stopped outside Langley. It turned out two pickups got into a pretty good fender bender (more like a “whole front end bender” for the one that hit the back of the other), but we got past the accident just after RCMP arrived and before the fire truck, so the delay was minimal.
• Jeff quizzed me extensively about getting cats nearly the entire drive from Hope to home
• We arrived home at 7 p.m. with plenty of daylight left. I unpacked. Jeff immediately went to the deck. 😛

And that was it!

Although the trip started not-great, and the various map tools all let us down, often in spectacular fashion, it was nice to get out of New West for a few days and there’s something about the look of the area around Kamloops I find strangely compelling. Maybe it’s just that it’s so visually distinct from the coast, where I’ve lived all my life. I’ll have some shots in the gallery soon™.

We began Day 2 in Kamloops and with time to relax and take in some local scenery before journeying to the wedding.

We had breakfast at McDonald’s because I really wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And I liked it!

After, we decided to visit the disc golf course at McArthur Park. The park is billed as the second largest in BC and indeed, it is big. I think it has something like 40 soccer fields.

We discovered the course is part of UDisc and had an app. There truly is an app for everything. We downloaded the app, created accounts, selected the course, created a scorecard and were off!

As it turned out, we should have checked the course map, because we started off literally in the wrong direction, the ultimate golfer faux pas. A nice guy helped us out, but by this point time was already starting to run a bit short. I suggested we move the golfing to the next day, when we would have nothing else to do (except drive back home at some point before dark). I then shot a few pics with my camera. There was a marmot. So cute! I took a bunch of photos of it. Then we found that the marmots are everywhere. Then we also discovered the mosquitoes–or rather, they discovered us. I further suggested we get out instead of being eaten alive. We did so.

We planned on leaving around 1 p.m. for the 3 p.m. wedding ceremony, but ended up heading out around half an hour later. At first, things were fine. The weather was partly cloudy, and the drive to Chase is along a flat stretch of highway that parallels the South Thompson River. As we approached Chase, I entered the address into the in-car navigator. We end up on a gravel road, but it seems to be going the right way. We continue on and it tells us we’ve arrived a short time later. But we’re at some random farm. As it turns out, it mysteriously stopped us far too soon. We (or rather I, because I totally should have realized what was happening) made the first wrong move: We switched to Google Maps. It sent us back and way off course. Time was starting to run short. I keyed the route into Apple Maps. It wanted to send us around the far side of Little Shuswap Lake–a route that would take us many km out of our way. We finally figured out we had been going the right way initially and returned to the gravel road.

Jeff drove at what one might call a brisk pace. Perhaps just a little above the posted 40 KPH speed limit. Perhaps. We also saw a scruffy young bear, which was sort of cute. Mom was probably just out of view, waiting to rip out the throat of anyone getting close to her kid.

We arrived literally a few minutes before 3 p.m.–technically not late!

As it turned out, the ceremony was late in starting, so it all turned out fine in the end.

Taylor and Derek got married in a barn. Or a very barn-like building. It was rustic.

After the ceremony, we had plenty of time to hang out and schmooze with people we didn’t know. I took a few more pics of horses, giant bugs and things, which I will link to in a gallery that will be magically edited into this post later.

While waiting for the reception and dinner, guests could choose from some snacks outside the hall, as shown below.

• On the left: Meat, cheese and brownies
• On the right: Veggies

The dinner was nice, though there didn’t seem to be any butter for the dinner buns. Maybe they were trying to be healthy after plying us with prepared meats and brownies beforehand.

In all, it all went as one would hope a wedding and reception would–short, but ice ceremony, speeches at the reception that ranged from thoughtful to funny, and were also short (you may be detecting a theme here), and good simple food without anything totally weird that would make people go back outside to see if any salami was left over (there wasn’t).

After the dinner and dessert (more brownies! Plus cheesecake), we headed back to our hotel before it got dark and wound down the evening, tucking in around 11 p.m. We both slept very well that night, probably because we were worn out from driving up and down that gravel road about a hundred times. I still see it in my dreams.

Programming note: I normally post vacation or travel entries on the day in question, but opted to just take notes and write them after the fact instead this time, so some details may be missing or totally made up for dramatic effect.

The last time Jeff and I went to Kamloops (in 2015), it was for his niece’s convocation (high school graduation). Despite it being June, it rained while we were there, and yet I still got a sunburn.

I did not get a sunburn this time.

This time we were heading there (actually further east to Chase) for her wedding at some quaint little ranch that is billed as a “wedding venue”.

A friend of Jeff’s provided us a gratis rental car, which was very nice. It was a BMW X2 and, as you might expect from a Beemer, was quite nice. The seats did not numb my butt, even on the long journey up the Coquihalla Highway.

We started out a bit later than intended, but would still arrive with plenty of daylight left.

Shortly after leaving, the grey sky turned even more sullen and showers started. We opted to stop for a late lunch in Chilliwack, where there is still a giant flag along Vedder Road. I had chicken strips at a Wendy’s and they were fine. We headed on past Chilliwack and began the ascent into the mountains. The rain picked up until it was coming down in sheets. This made for low visibility and a not-really-pleasant drive. It stressed me out.

Once we reached the Coquihalla Summit, the weather abruptly changed. This actually makes sense, because on our side it’s temperate rain forest, and on the other (Kamloops) side, it’s as close as you get to desert in BC. The mountains go from being covered in Evergreen to being covered in scrub and dotted with a few trees. There’s something about this forest minimalism I find aesthetically pleasing.

We got in and after a few minutes of the check-in clerk puzzling over our MoreRewards™ hotel voucher (we cashed in some points to get two nights free at the Best Western Premier, one of about 500 hotels on a stretch along Hugh Allen Drive. There is another hotel being constructed there even as I type this), we were given our key cards and went up to our room. Really, for the price (especially the free price), it was pretty decent.

But just like the hotel room I stayed at in Nashville 10 years ago, the office chair was broken, so in order to sit at the desk and not feel like a five-year-old trying to reach my laptop, I had to use one of the many pillows from one of the two beds to sit on. At least it was cushy.

By this time, I was feeling out of sorts from a combination of:

• Stress
• Right knee being a bother from the previous day’s run
• Left hand being weirdly achy as well (I think I slept on it funny or something–it’s fine now)

I curled up on the bed and dozed, until Jeff got hungry. We remained indecisive as to what or where to eat as our options began closing for the evening. We finally settled on getting something from a Triple O’s down the road. I had some garlic Parmesan fries. They were actually not bad. We crashed early. Or rather, I continued to crash.

It was a somewhat ignoble start to the trip. And I haven’t even talked about how the various maps apps (Apple Maps, Google Maps, the in-car navigation system) would give us sometimes confusing or nonsensical results. Both Apple and Google REALLY want you to do U-turns everywhere. U-turns are mostly illegal in Canada.

I only took a single shot on Day 1. Behold our hotel room, my sexy legs and a Swiss Chalet ad on the TV: