Oct  14

We began the day with Kathy reading some older blogs about the drive through the Rockies that would take us into BC today. She said, “was that supposed to provide me with a good outlook for the day”? After she drove the majority of the way today including the Kicking Horse and Roger’s Pass areas with the RV, she said “that was no big deal; I don’t know what that blogger was so paranoid about”.

Today began with light drizzle, which is the first we have seen in several days and for the first couple of hours low lying clouds were all around and below us. The sun wasn’t out until later in morning offering a different viewpoint of the Rockies.

The tour through the Rockies showed much higher and snow capped mountains than we saw back in the Banff area. Today’s drive was about 330 kms but it was a slower drive both with a few extra scenic stops and the slower speeds climbing the mountains highways.

Some of the highlights for today were Kicking Horse Pass, Roger’s Pass, the spiral tunnels, and the Natural Bridge. You could easily spend a few days in this stretch with better weather as there are many camp grounds, hiking trails and historic things to see. The Spiral tunnels date back 100 years CP Rail bore a spiral tunnel 1 km in length through the Kicking Horse Pass area (Mt. Ogden) so trains could pass through the area vs. using a previous track that went down a much steeper sloped passage way. Think of it – a “spiral tunnel”. http://www.bctravel.com/se/field.html

The Natural Bridge was quite something to see with the water over many years forming this bridge and the section under the bridge continues to widen with the force of water. Just Kathy and I and 2 other people were there luckily before 2 busloads of tourists pulled in as we were leaving. Going through Roger’s pass area, there were several avalanche tunnels as this area is one of the most treacherous areas in the world during the winter for avalanches. They actually control them as best they can by actually firing artillery to actually cause a “controlled” avalanche.

We arrived in Salmon Arm, BC which is situated on Shuswap Lake around 2 pm for a couple of nights of down time. We found a nice small campground with lots of Wi-Fi band width to get caught up on paying bills, blog, emails, news, etc. since we haven’t had wi-fi access for basically a week.

That’s the “poop” for today!