We spent the night at a picturesque farm in Okanogan, Washington thanks to Harvest Hosts (a website that provides information on wineries, breweries, farms, etc. happy to host RVers for the night). Although we might experiment with some more rugged boondocking in the future, we are finding we enjoy being in a place we are clearly allowed. The green beans, peas, and honeycrisp apples we purchased at the farm made the stop even better! To counter our local shopping, we paid a visit to Walmart to stock up on some groceries. Strategizing grocery shopping with limited fridge and cabinet space is a lot of fun. We are trying to start doing more meal planning so we don’t end up out of milk while we still have a full bag of carrots and six cans of beer. While we got stuck in the RV section for awhile finding lots of things we didn’t even know we needed (or at least Kelly didn’t know we needed), we managed to make it out without too many more things to fit in the van. We already feel like we have too much stuff so that it is near impossible to find a place for everything. A lot of our belongings are stored in four bins under the bed stacked two bins high. The bottom bins require some gymnastics to access which is particularly difficult after a day of hiking. We’ve decided we’ll give ourselves a few weeks and then revisit our organization and weed out anything we haven’t used.

After confirming our phones would work in Canada (they do!) we headed north on Highway 97 towards the border crossing. We were pleased to see the line only included a few cars and a couple cyclists. This was especially helpful since we had to go through the line twice. We learned that US firewood is not welcome in Canada. Also, if you are looking for any firewood, try gas stations near the border. This seems to be a popular drop off spot.

We wove our way through a myriad of wineries and green hills, which David enjoyed scoping out from the roof later. Those few extra feet of height can really enhance a view!

After remembering we didn’t have any Canadian dollars and luckily finding an ATM in a small town, we arrived at our destination for the night, Hydraulic Lake Recreation Site southeast of Kelowna, BC. We picked the spot to have direct access to the Kettle Valley Railway Trail. We found this trail with a quick Google search and were immediately intrigued. Along with a few other trails in the area, it creates a nearly 400 mile network off largely off road, gravel bike trails. Although tempted to alter our plans to do the whole thing, we settled for about a 30 mile out and back section from the campground through Myra, which includes several railroad trestles and tunnels. While on the ride, we started daydreaming about the future Salmonberry Trail planned through the Oregon Coast Range. While we love road riding, we are finding gravel riding to offer a little more excitement from the trail and significantly less excitement from cars. This ride also helped confirm we are happy with our bike choices for the trip – we were pretty tempted to bring both our mountain bikes and road bikes.

Next stop is Lake Country, just north of Kelowna. We will be enjoying the driveway of a couple we met theoguh Airbnb when they stayed at our house about a year ago. They built out a Sprinter van and we quickly bonded over travel and van tips.