This is the story of our journey from Culver, OR to Kelowna, BC on May 19th.

We woke up with high hopes of getting an early start, then snoozed any chance of that happening down the drain. After an hour and a half of convincing ourselves that we’ll get up in the next 5 minutes, we finally got up to start our day.

This was our first day camping in all of our new gear, and everything worked better than we hoped. We had everything packed within the hour and had time to make tea with our jetboil. Smashing success.

We left around 10:30am which, believe it or not, is an improvement since yesterday, so we’ll take it! We made a quick stop at Taco Bell, mainly to stock up on Tbell hot sauce for our potato burritos we would be eating throughout our trip. (It may sound like something you would never try but Emmy thought the same thing until she ate one.)

We were on the 97 for the rest of the day give or take a few side roads. The road was significantly more enjoyable today than before. The road curved *with* the land instead of just going straight through. The scenery wasn’t half bad either as we passed through the hills of OR and then the Cascades in WA.

Around 2pm, we stopped at some town in central WA to get gas then make lunch. We found a nice park to sit down and try out our first ramen with the jet boil. Emmy cooked the ramen as I made my way to the portapotty across the park. Inside the mobile bathroom, there was a big sign above the urinal part saying it’s only for peeing only. I felt so bad for that person who felt the need to put that sign up.

Our ramen rocked, our JetBoil rocked, couldn’t be happier with lunch. We ate with chopsticks in order to conserve space for packing. This proved a challenge for both of us, partly because we were rusty at our chop sticks, but mainly because Emmy was over zealous with breaking up the ramen before she put it in the water to boil. I think the longest noodle was about half an inch. Ya, Emmy had a few choice words when it was her turn to eat :p.

As we got further north in Washington, we saw an interesting turn out where several other motorcycles were going, and we noticed a massive tour bus in the parking lot, so I promptly turned the bike around and entered. This place apparently was called the Dry Falls and were supposedly the world’s largest waterfalls during the Ice Age. If you want proper information on site, you’ll have to check Google, but if you want to look at some of the bomb pictures we took, you can scroll on!

After some selfies and pictures, we got back on the bike to head out. As I was backing the bike up to turn it around before Emmy got on, we noticed a group of bikers eating ice cream! And it looked pretty darn yummy to boot. We started coming up with reasons about why we shouldn’t get the ice cream like we need to lose weight, or we are so far behind on time etc etc, but then I stopped and thought: “You know what? My dad would stop and get that ice cream.” So that’s exactly what I did, I re-parked my bike and we walked over and ordered two cones. I ended up getting Huckleberry Heaven and Emmy got the Death by Chocolate.

While we were enjoying our cones, Emmy mentioned that she wanted to get some pictures of us eating ice cream with the good camera. This was an incredible idea until it was my turn to take a picture of her. This next set of pictures is a mini time-lapse of Emmy’s frustration with me as I operated the camera like a jack hole (those were her words not mine).

We were seriously running behind at this point considering our late start plus our stops. We had planned on reaching Osoyoos before 6 so that we could go to the Bell store to pick up a sim card for my phone, but at that point, we had to shift our plans and handle that tomorrow. At this point, we just wanted to get to Kelowna before dark.

We continued on from the Dry Falls going further north into Washington. We were blown away by how many vineyards there were along the hillsides. It was quite the view. As we drove north along the Okanagon River, we kept commenting about how large the river seemed. Then we started noticing that some of the barns and fields were actually under water! Emmy looked it up, and it turns out the Okanagon River was actually flooded and evacuations were put in place for this area due to the melting of massive snow pack this year. It was truly sad and scary to see how high and close the water got to these people’s homes. On the flip side, it did make for some pretty stunning pictures. And I have to give Emmy props on being able to take really good pictures while cruising at 70mph.

We finally made it to the Canadian border that evening, confirmed that we weren’t carrying any weapons or drugs and then made our way into Beautiful British Columbia. Our initial impression of BC was amazing. We traveled through the valley with mountains on both sides. The sides of the mountains were covered with vineyards. I’ve never been to France, but this felt exactly like what I imagined rural France to be.

We made it to Kelowna right at 9:55pm, 5 minutes before the campground we were staying at closed, nice…. We spent the next 15-30 minutes setting up in dark. It’s more like twilight, but we still needed a flashlight to see what we were doing.

Tensions were a bit high during setup, partly because the ground was pretty much solid rock and made driving the stakes in an impossible feat and partly because Emmy crossed into Africa starving territory. After we assembled the tent, for the sake of our marriage (and my personal safety), we looked for a good place to eat since Kelowna was a decently sized city and had a fun downtown.

We found a Sports Bar & Grill, ordered two burgers which were stinking delicious, then headed back to our campsite for a nights rest.

Couldn’t complain about our day one bit, the scenery was stunning for most of the drive. We had only been in BC for a few hours, but it did *not* disappoint. Looking forward to seeing more of its beautiful scenery.

— RJ