Well the numbers are in and since leaving Vancouver on September 9th, we have traveled 4039 kilometers (2500 miles)!!! All that mileage and we have been having a great time visiting with friends and seeing new places. And yes we have been camping with no drama at all.
After leaving Vernon, we traveled east to Golden which is on the boarder of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We spent 2 days visiting with our friends Babe and Sue in their funky little expanse of mountain acreage. They have a beautiful new home that is just being finished, a studio where they have lived for the past 10 years which will now be Babe's painting studio and a really cute little A frame cabin that is a short hike up the mountain side. Ian and I got to spend our nights there in that little cottage with a wood burning fire and no electricity.
From Golden we headed south through the East Kootenay Mountains then west to Rossland which is a ski town (Red Mountain) and where our friends Pat and Les live. We spent a wonderful week visiting with them and we even got to go out sailing for the weekend on their new Catalina 28 foot sailboat. It was a great sail with steady wind and no waves - my kind of sailing! We were on the Arrow Lakes which is actually part of the Columbia River which has been dammed creating a lake which stretches 230 kilometers. I was surprised at the depths we were seeing on the lake the deepest I saw on the depth sounder was 170 feet! It's a little eerie to think that you are over trees and even some farms and settled land that has now become the bottom of a lake.
Back at Pat and Les's place, we were treated one afternoon to the sight of a mother bear and her cub shaking the plums out of the tree across the lane. We were about 50 feet away and had a great view. Mom finally spotted us and they left and crossed the street to see what was on offer at the neighbours.
We left Rossland on September 19th and headed south. The boarder is about 9 miles from Rossland so in no time we were in the US. We had decided to travel along the highway 395 which I would recommend to anyone wanting to go south on the road less traveled. It has spectacular scenery and for the first 2 days we saw very little traffic. We detoured off the highway to go around Lake Tahoe instead of going through Reno. This detour was well worth the trip as we passed over some very high mountain passes with the highest being over 8000 feet. It made me very happy that Ian had installed a new master cylinder on the breaks while we were in Rossland!
We camped a total of 3 nights as we traveled south and on the 4th day, we arrived in San Diego and are now happily visiting with Penny and Fred who are good cruising friends we met in Mexico in 2010. They returned to San Diego with their boat in 2011 and this year they are taking Tapatai south to Mexico again for the winter which makes us very happy as we will get to see them this winter.
That so far is our trip south. The next blog I do will be from San Diego south to La Paz. We are so looking forward to getting back to Kasasa and to get cruising again so stay tuned...