Road Trip - Kootenay to Penticton

Today we drove on the Crowsnest Highway through the Selkirk and Purcell mountains to Summerland, a smallish town on the west side of Okanagan Lake.

We packed up early and had breakfast at a cafe just down the road called Tulsi. It intrigued me that the cafe was called that, but had no apparent link to Indian cuisine. I've just looked it up, and Tulsi is actually the Hindi name of a plant called Holy Basil. Now their Wi-Fi password makes sense!

We drove for ages, up and down mountains and along winding valleys. Over the journey we noticed the sky becoming more and more hazy. It looked like it was misty or foggy, except it was about 38 degrees outside. Scanning through the news headlines, we discovered that several major wildfires are currently burning in the Okanagan Valley, which is where we were headed! Apparently, there had been a thunderstorm a day or two earlier, and, enabled by the hot, dry weather, lightning had started seven huge fires.

We checked local news and saw that one provincial campground had been evacuated, and also read that there was an air quality warning in place for the Okanagan area. Even though we weren't sure if our campsite was going to be open, we carried on.

We stopped for lunch in Osoyoos and had a drink and some chips next to their local lake. The beach was teeming with people, all trying to find some relief from the heat. The town felt very Spanish inspired, with lots of brown, yellow, and terracotta colours. Anders' thermometer was reading 39°C, so we didn't hang around in the open for too long.

The Okanagan Valley has a very dry, sunny climate, and is famous for fruit and wine. The contrast between the arid brown hills and lush irrigated fields and orchards was amazing. They must use so much water here! We turned down a side road after seeing a sign advertising a fruit stand, and after 5 minutes of being convinced we'd taken the wrong turn, we came across an open shed selling fresh fruit. We bought some punnets of cherries, nectarines, and apricots, and after the lady gave us some samples of her home-dried apricots, we bought a bag of them as well.

We arrived safely in Summerland and found our campsite to be very much not on fire. The main fires were over the hill, a little further north in the valley. The air is hazy when you look into the distance and smelled a little like smoke when we first got out of the car, but it's unnoticeable now. We set up camp on a frustratingly sloped site and met the couple staying in the tent next to us, who very kindly gave us a bowl of cherries they'd picked earlier that day!