A bit later than usual as I was away on holidays, but we’re back in the field! I am seeing a big difference between Oats who gets turnout (he is not allowed for 1 year after his injury) and the Oats who isn’t turned out….The Oats of this year is HOT HOT HOT in the field. He was amped, so amped that all he wanted to do was bolt straight up the hill, all the time lol!!
Walking after a LOT of work
I am not used to riding hot-spicy-butt on fire Oats, haha. We ended up doing a lot and I mean LOT of work in the field to settle. Almost 1 hour straight and it was quite warm out. I don’t know where he gets this energy? I may have added to his excitement by jumping the hay bales that are literally everywhere, hahah. He was on fire about it! Got so excited that he started bucking afterwards, and then almost bucked me off going up the hill. Crazy Oats?!
In his fairness I did get left behind a few hay bales and he really didn’t like that, so he threw a few bucks on landing. I get it Oats, totally get it- ride better!
We rode a few more canters (controlled in a circle, thanks very much) and then trotted more, up and down, and then called it quits and walked around. His nostrils were flaring even! I hopped off and walked him to cool out in the farm yard, and then hosed him down. He hasn’t worked that hard in over a year, I don’t think?!
The Oats who gets turnout is never that hot to trot, so this Oats certainly is jazzed up and has energy to move his butt.
Which actually wasn’t smoky really, but as the wildfires gathered strength I heard it got much, much worse. We did get incredibly lucky on this trip on the whole!
We drove through Vernon and it was wall-to-wall cars from Vernon to Kelowna and Kelowna was just terrible. Gridlock traffic the entire way. WTF??
Winery tasting with the family
We couldn’t check in to our hotel (damned Kelowna hotels, we stayed at the Prestige Beach location and I kind of hate it…) until after 4pm so we had hours to kill with Gidget. I decided I wanted to check out Gellatly’s Nut Farm which is also a beach and provincial/historical park. We couldn’t walk Gidget through the nut orchards because they apparently were worried that some dumbass child would mistake a dog shit for a nut (which then I think, they had it coming…) so we took turns cruising through the orchard and I found a hazelnut and a walnut! The walnut was interesting, all green and the nut inside the ‘fruit’. I had Ian dig it out and it stained his fingers for a week!!!
Summertime and the living is easy
We had dinner at my folks place, went for a swim and the next day met them in the morning for a swim and a nice visit to a winery close to their house.
That’s a big beer
We then staggered around in the heat downtown which was tougher than I thought, I felt so hot and dehydrated?!
Summerhill Winery’s pyramid of mystery
Back to my parents for dinner, birthday cake and a swim (which was awesome!), a walk to their beach locally and then back to the hotel. The next day we were up bright and early to drive to stay a night in Vancouver, where we ran the sea wall (yes!!) and had Moroccan dinner, which was very cool, and then back home- holidays all over!
A few years ago I went to a cocktail event here in Victoria and tried a fun pecan whiskey that was called Revelstoke because they wanted to ‘Stoke the Revel’ and man, it made me laugh every time I thought of it!
So naturally we went to Revelstoke to really get into the party scene 😉
Ok not really but after Christina Lake, we wanted to get some hiking in and my husband is a trip-planner extraordinaire (I am terrible at it, just awful) so we had something different to do and enjoy in each place. We camped for 1 night after an extremely long and kind of tough travel day (avoid Hwy 30…it’s 100km of freaking dirt road and can get very shifty for about 30kms and takes FOREVER)…. We camped at a site just outside the bridge and apparently next to the train, ha.
Marmots blend in really well to the rocks.
Not a restful night, really. Plus Gidget decided she hated camping and her max was 2 days, so she was in a deflated snit about it all day and night, refusing to eat, moping around, just nothing. Argh, dogs! The campsite was pretty lame, sites so close you could peer into your neighbours tent but it had excellent clean and nice washrooms with great showers, so no complaints there!
Ok for one night, no thanks for more- particularly if you are Gidget!
We then stayed at the Stoked Hotel and man the rooms were hilariously small- basically like a closet? Oh wait, no closet though, lol. Oh well Gidget was happy to be in a room again at last, where she belongs like a princess 🙂
Wild strawberries!
We did a small loop the first day of hiking at Revelstoke Mountain National Park (up to Inspiration Loop) and found SO many berries- it was amazing!! Thimbleberries, black huckleberries, blueberries, strawberries and wild raspberries. Lucky us! And…lucky for the bears, because we promptly walked into one on the trail. It stood up briefly, but we shouted as we walked back down the trail and it left us alone, thank god. I had Gidget in a backpack, so I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a bear encounter…Eeek.
Yes there was snow! It was a sub-alpine lake we were heading to. Eva Lake.
We then went up to the ski jump and that is a cool 1km straight uphill, hot hot hot! Did some great strawberry picking on the way though.
We had a selection of great restaurants and bakeries to go to, so awesome. We took some bakery items hiking with us for a quick lunch, and it was delicious! That night we went out to the Craft Beer restaurant for some sweet beers, mac and cheese and a lame salad (ok the salad tasted great but the dressing was non-existent?!!) So a bit of a miss there.
View from the ski jump. Steeeeep
The next day we set out for a real hike and could leave Gidget in the room. We chose a very accessible loop at the Park, and it cost $20 to drive up and hike there. It was nice to be able to like drive 30 mins to the top of the mountain and hike from there- sooo easy to access, great for hikers like us who are not serious and don’t want to spend two days doing it.
The loop was about 6m, took us to two beautiful lakes, NO bears and three marmots were sighted!!! So amazing. We walk-ran it (I am still recovering from multiple leg injuries 6 months ago) and it was pretty rocky and tough in some spots. I also tripped as I am running in shoes that are no way appropriate for hiking and almost bailed face-first into a rock. Phew!!
It was beautiful to see and a great way to spend the day. We cruised back, chatted with the Park Rangers, and they suggested another short loop to read more about the Indigenous Peoples who lived on the land. It was an informative and fun little loop (1k?) and after that, a short run back to the car for another KM and we were done!
By that time it was getting very smoky. Unfortunately there are serious wildfires and one started up at Sicamous quite close to Revelstoke when we landed there. The smoke started blocking out the sun 😦 We had the great fortune to only be there for 1 really smoky day and then we were off to Kelowna to visit my family.
We enjoyed a new restaurant that night too- the Taco Club! I can highly recommend, good but pricey margaritas with some unusual twists, and I had the burrito bowl and NO WAY could I finish it- my husband had to. Too much food! Always a good thing 😉
And my vacation continues! I wanted to write more last week but work got tooooo busy. After we spent some time in Princeton (there isn’t much there, ha. We did some swimming, hanging out in the river, and running), we zipped off to Christina Lake which wasn’t too far.
The river site at the campground. Living our best life!
There isn’t much of a town there but WOW the lake, it is just incredible. So warm- the warmest I have ever felt in Canada. Remarkable! The lake is also quite large but you can access it from a few different points. They do not allow dogs anywhere near the main lake at the provincial park, so we packed up our dog and went to the next park over where there was a big campsite AND they allowed dogs at the dog beach. Plus, the dog beach was super nice- usually it’s crappy and miserable, but this one was great.
Ice cream at Christina Lake, yumm!
We camped the two nights in Christina Lake at a small campsite that had it’s own river access with a sandy beach- I can’t tell you how incredible THAT felt, it was soooooooooo awesome. We basically had our own swimming hole shared with the other campers, and it was a very quiet campsite. So fortunate! I loved it.
The lake itself- sooo inviting.
We swam, camped out, went into ‘town’ for an ice cream and generally hung out in the sun for a few days. It was blazing hot out so that was key to be near the water. So amazing though 🙂 Gidget on the other hand had some complaints about camping…To be continued 😉
Back to reality indeed! We did get incredibly lucky on our trip- the Interior was starting to flame out, but we only had issues with smoke in Revelstoke and we were only there for a few days. Thank god. It is also an issue because no WAY does anyone want to be a tourist in a place that is being evacuated/needed for hotel rooms. How tone deaf would that be?? Yikes! So we had our holiday timed well, as the fires got a lot worse when we came home.
But otherwise, it went really nicely! We started off with a few nights in Princeton, which is kind of a small nowhere town but has gorgeous scenery, a nice river, a great restaurant, I guess one of two existing restaurants- (the Copper Pit!!) and some fun trails to run courtesy of the Kettle Valley Railway. Here are the first few photos 🙂
Rainbow Bridge at Manning Park
One of three accidents we saw on the trip. Everyone was fine, thankfully!
Manning Park
The town of Coalmont- a total ghost town outside of Princeton driving down this insane avalanche canyon road! No cell service at all!
No more heatwave so things are getting back to normal! I even rode in the field yesterday (and Oats got very excited at the canter and took off with me up a hill bucking…Thanks dude).
We were able to resume our jump lesson on Saturday and we even were able to ride outdoors – not a small feat since the footing is so unstable and deep, I had been avoiding riding out there for Oats’ and my safety, but decided to try it for a few small jumps.
The little tires are cute eh?
We warmed up indoors (and man, Oats was SLUGGY) going kind of nowhere fast, ha. We schooled a few jumps, he had a meltdown at the backdoor again (sigh) and then it was outdoors to try our hand at a few safer fences located in areas where it wasn’t too deep.
Me giving a big and totally unnecessary release…
It was good! I bigtime bungled a few of the fences by grabbing back on Oats, but he’s an old pro and was not really phased ha. He was like, if you stop riding like crap, I’ll go better also! Win-win 🙂
This little line rode pretty nicely when I got my head in the game!
I am heading out for holidays soon too actually- just 2 more days to go….Ah…
The adventures of Mr. Oats 