The time fillers

Since we found out about our job managing the lodge, we have been in all directions filling in time before we start at the start of Dec...

We left Hope with our van loaded with all our stuff and another road trip ahead of us (minus one team member). Our goal was to finish exploring the Canadian Rockies, so we continued south east ish. We first headed to Kelowna to catch up with Dave Aubrey and check out his new place. Kelowna, Dave, Colin and Leslie were awesome to stay with and after a few nights of catch up we hit the road again, south to a town only 30min away, but because the road was closed it took us more like 2 hours (good thing we have off road tyres now!).

Oh the fall colours of the Maple Tree

So this town was called penticton and rumours were it hosted great climbing (Skaha). So we checked it out, lucky we had Daves local knowledge - otherwise im not too sure if we would have ever found it. With no guide book we just walked around and attempted stuff that "looked" like it was in our league. Which turned out to be a great day. Upon reitirng to the van in the car park and cooking up some dinner we bumped into a couple (also living out of their car) who were climbing also. They kindly offered to show us the ropes so to speak, and we accepted because they had a guide book and we didnt. Turns out they were a bit better than us (not hard to be really) and we ended up top roping some of the stuf they were getting on...


We climbed there for 3 days but barley scraped the surface, this place had endless amounts of rock still waiting to be climbing. We took photos of the others climbing guide and hit up some stuff more in our climbing range and also climbed to the tops for some views.

Penticton

The endless amounts of rock!

From there we continued South through the Okenhagen Valley towards Nelson. Luckily enough I got hold of some of my friends from NOLS and got to have some good old catch ups. Nelson was a great little town, we hiked around, shopped, went to hot springs in a cave, and drank a lot of tea. Shaun found his whole ski touring set up in a second hand store, and is waiting impatiently for some snow!

Waving good bye to my friends Roger and Jeff, we contiued to Golden - ready to move out of the van and into a room you can walk in and a bed you can sit up in without straining your neck. That night we had the best sleep in ages!!

Wait but it dosnt end there...we actually leave Golden the next day towards Banff and went to the infamous film festival, which was awesome! We then headed down to Calgary to visit some extended family of Shauns, Sue and Nigel. They had a house out of the city on about 22 acres, it was so nice to be out in the country, it felt like we were back in Canterbury. Sue and Nigel made us feel super spoiled and it was great to feel so welcome. We got to explore some of the foothills and the area.

Fresh snow, fresh bear tracks!

We also explored a town called Drumheller, which is located in this really interesting valley in the middle of nowhere in the praries. This town has the biggest dinosaue museum in the world. Turns out a lot of dinosaurs were found in the area...

Some of the landscape was pretty cool

This T-Rex was chasing us, but Shaun managed to shake him off just in the nick of time!

We then headed back to Banff for the final screening of the winning films and the awards ceremony, it was a really good night and was cool to see were it all starts from. Late that night at about 2 am we make it back to Golden...and here we are now exploring some of the local sights etc... and filling in time.

There is a local Wolf farm, which was uprisingly intresting - these wolves were huge! and so gorgoeus

We have been getting snow regularly but unfornatly the temps are not cold enough for it to stay, today we played around in excitement, shauns about to cane himself in the photo above..

So this brings us up to date in where we are at, we are happy to have a roof over out heads now and a full kitchen to cook in!

Just wanted to thank everyone who has helped us out on way or another - this has really made out trip! So thank you we really appreciate it!

well keep you posted on how the snow is going...