July 12, 2023
To Penticton
We both woke up early this morning, before 5:30, with the idea that we wanted to get an early start on the long drive east through the mountains to Penticton. The forecast for the day is hot, with the chance of thunderstorms starting around noon. Check-in at our Penticton motel isn’t until four, so our thinking is that we’ll break up the drive with a bike ride on Old Hedley Road east of Princeton. We’ll get the ride in earlier in the day before it warms up too much and while there’s less chance of rain.
So give us credit for good intentions, but that’s it. We don’t actually make it out the door until nearly nine for some reason, and it’s about noon when we pull off the highway at Picard Creek Campground and start unloading the bikes. It’s starting to look ominously grey to the east, but we decide we’ll start biking and keep a flexible attitude. We’ll be biking upriver and into the wind, so if we lose our window we can just turn around and sail back to the car without incurring too much damage.
That’s the theory anyway. When we’re unloading though Rachael hears a low sound that I then pick up and conclude it’s an airplane. I’m wrong though - it’s the faint rumble of distant thunder. As we bike out of the parking lot we feel a few drops of precipitation but feel silly just hopping back in the car so we keep going.
Rachael leaves me behind immediately of course, with the plan that she’ll just turn back when it feels like time. That time comes when after eight miles she comes to a cattle guard she’d have to dismount for and decides that the weather seems menacing enough that she’s found her excuse.
It for sure seems like the right idea, as the wind has picked up, it’s lightly sprinkling, and the sky looks like it could break open any minute. It doesn’t, as it turns out. The clouds pass and we would have been fine for the whole 40 mile ride we’d mapped out if we’d known. We’re fine with it though - it’s a short but pleasant ride, it breaks up the drive nicely, and it’s delayed us enough so that our room is ready when we arrive in Penticton.
One last thing about the ride: Old Hedley Road felt like a discovery, something I uncovered by staring at the map - a quiet, left-behind route that was obsoleted by the coming of the Crowsnest Highway, it follows the Similkameen River on the opposite bank from the highway. I did some research to see if I could learn anything about biking on Old Hedley Road, but came up dry. Depressingly though, information was readily available if we’d thought to look in the right place: in our own blog, since we biked this road just five years ago on our way from Osoyoos to Princeton. We’d both forgotten we’d ever been to either Princeton or Osoyoos, much less that we’d actually ridden this road.
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Soon after we’re checked in at our hotel we both leave on errands. Rachael’s off to the store to provision us for our three night stay here, and I’m off to a VW service shop with an urgent concern - our car won’t lock! A bad situation, especially when we plan to often leave it parked with the bikes inside at our various lodgings. We just discovered this today. We found the doors unlocked this morning, so I assumed I’d spaced out and forgotten to lock up last night. Today I’m being especially vigilant as a result, locking the car and then testing the handle to see if it’s locked. After about a half dozen failed attempts like this I decide I need help. Nothing useful crops up on an internet search, so I’m relieved to find a shop in town.
I’m at the shop four minutes - just long enough for the mechanic to walk out to the car, test it out, and give me an overview on no-touch key systems like our car has. I’ve always used the remote to lock and unlock the Raven, but in fact you don’t need this. Proximity is sufficient. If the key is close to the car you can unlock it just by grasping the driver’s door handle. I’d been repeatedly locking the car and then unlocking it by testing the lock with the door handle. How can we have had the car for three years and not known this? Rachael doesn’t return from grocery shopping until about a half hour after me because the trip to the store and back was 3.5 miles and she had to lug some heavy groceries back.
Dinner time comes, and we walk a half mile to the Wild Ginger for a Thai dinner. We’re a few blocks from the motel when there’s a flash of lightning and a second later we’re deafened by a load clap that feels too close for comfort. It starts raining and we’re leveraging the awnings on Main Street to try to keep dry until we reach the restaurant, and ten minutes later the sky falls in. This is what we were afraid of on the bike ride and the reason we turned back as soon as we did.
It’s all stopped by the time we walk back after dinner though, and soon after we’re back I leave again for a walk along the waterfront while Rachael hangs out in the room.
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Video sound track: Adrift, by Yasmin Williams
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2023 Bird List
163. Ring-billed gull
Today's ride: 19 miles (31 km)
Total: 629 miles (1,012 km)
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