N’Kolah to Kelowna to Rock Creek.

 

Saturday Sept. 17   We left Chilliwack and drove to N’Kolah  Campsite a free Government Recreation Park, along the Nicola River, Like almost every area of BC it was extremely dry and there was a campfire ban in effect. There were about a dozen other RVs there spread out over three levels. .

We had no close neighbors which is good when you are travelling with three dogs.

 

We had intended to travel to Kelowna on Sunday but we discovered when we came from our walk that we had two flat tires on the tracker, one tire would hold air when Skip inflated it, but the other had too big a hole, so he had to put the spare on.

We went into Merrit but there was no repair  shop open until Monday so we had to stay another night. Merritt is the site of the Merritt Mountain Music Festival. thousands of country music fans converge there every July to camp, party and watch the stars perform. some of the stars have their pictures painted on the side of the buildings and their handprints on a plaque.

N’Kolah was a dry dusty campground, the Nicola river was very low. We found little cactus growing among the pine needles.

Monday morning we went into Merritt to see if Kal Tire could fix our tires, they took us in right away, one tire had a piece of metal in it the other had a drill bit about four inches long..what are the chances of that. They didn’t charge us for the repair, told us to stop in Kelowna and get  the tires torqued,  We thought that was pretty nice of them.

We were off to Kelowna  and Bear Creek Provincial Park, where they almost had a disastrous fire labor day weekend, there were 300 campers in the park when a fire broke out on the hill behind and came right to the fence line,They had to evacuate the whole park at night the rvs went to Wal-Mart and the tenters went to a community center, We could see the burned trees behind the parking lot, and some trails were closed because they were falling burned trees.

 

Okanogan Lake was beautiful and Kelowna is such a pretty city, we’re told it has a population of over 200,000, and it’s now the second largest city in BC. We remember it when it was a small town .

Okanogan Lake

  Our campsite

 

On Monday we went to Sharon and Randy’s home for dinner. They own a wonderful butcher shop in the Mission District.

We had a wonderful  steak dinner and a nice visit with them and their daughter Brittney.

Tuesday morning we were off to Rock Creek, where we stayed at Kettle  River Provincial Park, it was a nice park, very different from the parks on Vancouver Island, it is very arid country.

The Kettle River was down a path by our site

Don’t know what they are looking at

The ranger told us that the campground was closing in two days, and some of the other  campgrounds we were heading to were already closed. We particularly wanted to go to Christina Lake, apparently it had closed Sept 18th.

So because plans are made to be changed we decided to head south, we are in Idaho at Hells Gate State Park. and it’s really really hot. This post is too long so I will  tell you about that tomorrow.

 

Jean

I finally figured out why I couldn't post last night. My Picassa photo storage was full. I deleted one picture from this blog and ordered more storage. We are in Island City Oregon, because this is where our GPS sent us.

Jean