Kamloops is a city situated about 4.5 hours by car east of Vancouver, where our friends Dave and Cathie now live (they used to live in Alberta) so we took the opportunity to spend a few days with them. After a somewhat stressful exiting of Vancouver (i.e. getting lost for half an hour or so) we made it up to their place. The landscape here is of rolling hills which are governed not by trees but by sage bushes and other prairie kinds of vegetation. There are some forests on some of the higher peaks. The photo above shows Cathie, Dave and Steve on the lookout for burrowing owls - and Cathie did find one for us! It was perched on a stump looking for field mice and what not.
I can't disconnect the two pics above so the first is of another part of the local landscape where Dave and Cathie tools his walking one morning and the one above is us having lunch in their back yard. It was a lovely few days and we also visited the local wildlife park and saw a couple of young grizzlies playing ruff and tumble with each other; went to the local cinema to see Boyhood, which is an excellent movie; and checked out a couple of second hand bookshops as well as doing a number of walks through the hill country.
After spending three days with Dave and Cathie we then spent the weekend with our other friends living in Kamloops (who would have though), Kathy and Harold. I used to work with them at University of Newcastle in the early to mid 90s and indeed Kathy and I shared an office for a couple of years. They took us up to this lovely skiing village called Sun Peaks about 40 minutes from Kamloops, where they spend much of the winter skiing. It was a gorgeous sunny and warm day when we were up there and we had a couple of beers under the green umbrellas.
Kathy and Harold also drove us about two hours or so to a provincial park (the name of which escapes me at the moment, and which is akin to our national parks) where we were able to walk through stunning forests in which many of the trees were starting to take on their fall colours and where there was also a good assortment of waterfalls.
It was a brilliant day and although we didn't see any bears we loved spending time out in the forests and viewing the magnificent waterfalls.
Kathy and I alongside one of the rivers. It was wonderful to spend the weekend with Kathy and Harold and their two sons, Jonathan and Kai. I hadn't seen them for probably 15 years or so...maybe a bit longer.
Another river, this time with salmon leaping upwards. Well we saw a couple of salmon - it wasn't quite like the nature documentaries with the dozens of hungry grizzly bears, portray, but it was tremendous to see the salmon jumping out of the water in its attempt to get beyond the rapids and further up the stream where it hoped to lay its eggs (or fertilise them, whatever the case may be).
After our five days in Kamloops we drove back towards Vancouver but we detoured off the highway to Chilliwack, where our friend Ryan, who now lives in Cairns, comes from. We had morning tea at the Yellow Deli, which, we found out when we got inside, is run by a spiritual community and which has a number of locations in Canada, USA and also Katoomba, I just discovered when I Googled them. Anyway, the food was scrummy and provided us with sustenance for the journey back into Vancouver airport and then back into the city so we could spend the next three nights at an airbnb apartment.
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