Miles, Kilometers, What the Heck?

We drove from Anacortes to Lac La Hache yesterday. It took us about 7 hours and it was a very impressive drive.  I couldn't do a lot of looking around because most of the drive follows rivers and gos up over passes which kept my attention on the road and not on the beauty around us.

The highway led us up the Fraser River and then up the Thompson River breaking away North bound at Cache Creek. We monitored our progress in miles and hours on the road. I had mapped the entire route out with Google Maps but I think they use a combination of miles and kilometers when they give me their total mileage.  I had a tough time predicting our arrival and assessing our progress because of the combination of the measurements. To compound my distance problem further, all the towns and points of interest are named after miles distance. If you look on a map you travel through towns called 70 Mile House, 100 Mile House,  and an example of a lake would be 103 Mile Lake. None of these names match the kilometers driven, which don't match the miles, which therefore cause the metric impaired, to be completely confused all the time they drive.  Linda called out the metric speeds and then calculated the miles per hour, and then shouted to me to SLOW DOWN! By the time we reached our destination I was a mathematical mess.

We arrived at Jill and Barry's and were blown away with their home. It is right on the lake and is an awesome retreat.

During the day we were able to watch two rockets get launched into space and Barry and Jill took us for a boat tour of the lake. We had a great time. We closed out the evening with everyone sitting around watching lightning while telling each couples stories of how they met, got engaged and then married.  It was cute and funny at the same time.  Kobi hid under our legs but  in the end he either was board of our stories or just couldn't take the thunder any longer and he got restless to go to bed so the party died down.

Launching rockets into the blue.

Jani, Chris and Emma packed up and left Grandma and Grandpa with tears in their eyes. As a bit of a diversion we all loaded up and drove to Williams Lake to look around.  Locals call it Bill’s Pond, but it really is a lake.  Lakes are very prevalent up in this region.  I think we saw about 50 of them as we drove up.

On Friday we all loaded into the car and Barry drove us into 100 Mile House where we spent the morning cruising the farmers market, having coffee and buying groceries.  100 Mile House is rather small but it has everything that you might need to be comfortable.

 

Successful launch and return.

Once we loaded up on our dinner we drove back out to the lake and spent the afternoon sunning.  Our dinner choice for the evening was stir fry and we got a chance to eat some sesame tofu in vegetables with noodles. Jill through the dinner together and it was delicious!  Linda and I had never eaten tofu before and we found it to be very good.  I’ll be looking into some recipes when we get back home.

With dinner over and dishes finished we got in the boat and motored out to watch the sun set.  In one direction you could see a beautiful orange-yellow sunset and in the other the almost full moon sparkled off the water.  Full moon will be Tuesday night so the man in the moon was very visible.  Once the sun sank into the distance we slowly made our way back to the dock. It was our last night and what a beautiful one it turned out to be.

Keep an eye on it!

Saturday we packed up, said our good byes and hit the road.  It was a bit sad to go, but we needed to give Barry and Jill some time to get back into their normal life.  They had visitors for over two weeks and we were the ones stringing things out.  So we drove off to make our way to Merritt, BC where we had made reservations to camp.

Four otters playing in the lake.

Caterpillar, anyone? Anyone? 

Jill and Barry's place from the boat.

The evening conversations begin.

Maybe a pot of gold over there.