New Website and New Adventure! + Video!
Welcome to adventure arc at adventurearc.com! Yuki and I have been thinking of making a webpage for some time now and I finally made the jump from blogspot to wordpress! I hope to make this webpage the new home for my blog.
To kickstart the new webpage is a new adventure that we took over the ong weekend. Yuki and I borrowed a Modo truck to go on a camping road trip. The plan was to leave early Saturday and spend Saturday in Kelowna. Sunday would be in and around Kamloops and on Monday we’d come back to Vancouver.
The days prior to the trip was a lot of preparation. We organized the food for the trip and bought some new camping supplies including two zip together sleeping bags and another sleeping mat. On Saturday, we were off!
We left at 9am and the drive up was pretty good. There was a little traffic but I think we managed to beat most of it and made quick time to the interior. We took the Coquihalla Highway up to Meritt. As we were descending into Meritt we thought it would be a good time to find a nice viewpoint and have lunch but before we knew it, we were in the valley and driving up the other side. Fortunately, I spied a sign along the highway that pointed to a recreation site so we gave it a shot.
A short drive down a well graded gravel road we came to an absolutely beautiful lake and campground. It’s called Marquart Lake and it’s only about 5 minutes drive east of Merritt on highway 97C. At one end were several tents and at the far end, a small RV campground with a boat launch. We wished we’d brought kayaks as we watched some people paddling around and fishing. There were also kids on ATVs and dirt bikes as well as a woman on a horse.
We parked near the boat launch and got out for some pictures:
Then we had an excellent lunch of tuna sandwiches as well as a mango. When we left, we made a mental note to return here again one day. It would be an excellent place to camp and explore, plus it was free.
The rest of the drive to Kelowna was mostly uneventful. I kept an eye out for motorcycles and pointed them out to Yuki. There were quite a lot of touring bikes and cruisers.
When we got to Kelowna, we went to Bear Creek Park and Campground. I didn’t realize how few campgrounds there were in Kelowna but this park at least had a short hiking trail that I thought would be nice to do.
Immediately, we noticed how dry the terrain is here and how desert like it is. There were a lot of pine trees and I was even able to pull the bark off of a tree and see a giant mountain pine beetle. The trail went up the sides of a creek canyon and back down the other side.
Once the heat had gotten to us, we crossed the floating bridge into downtown and circled the block before deciding that we didn’t want to pay to park at the lake’s artificial beach. We decided to get a root beer milkshake from A&W and then I saw a sign for trestles that sounded cool so we looked it up on the data.
The directions sent us to the Kettle Valley Railway, one of the more famous railways in the province. There’s a 12 km route that use to be the railway but is now a multi use bike and pedestrian walkway that circles the valley. Although there were bike rentals, we chose to walk the first 2.5 km to see about 6 trestles and one tunnel.
The park didn’t disappointed and we geeked out a little. To see so many structures in such close proximity with a great background of mountains and valleys made for a really great experience. This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me and I took lots of photos.
The coolest thing was probably the benches. They were shaped in the form of trestles too.
One of the things with camping is that once it gets late, one starts to get worried about where to spend the night. Setting up camp and cooking in the dark is less fun so we were pretty anxious to find a campground. Kelowna is pretty crappy for camping because 1) there are very few campgrounds and 2) everyone seems to have RVs. We barely saw any tent campers. Pretty much everyone had an RV or a tow trailer.
After striking out at 3 campgrounds, we found a campground in Vernon but it was bloody expensive. $34! At least it had hot showers, which we both used rather unsuccessfully. I didn’t figure out how to adjust the temperature and water pressure until I was done and Yuki forgot to bring a towel so she had to dry herself with her dusty fleece.
Just as we were getting ready for bed it began to rain. That sucked, but after one great day, we were happy campers.
Checkout the go pro video we made of our first day on the road:
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