RV Camp August Long Weekend in BC: Avoiding Smoke & Heat!

Now don't worry, Mickey and Finch are here. I'm just sitting outside enjoying where we're at. I think you're going to have to guess where that is. The hint might be, what, a game? Now maybe the more interesting question is where are we going? And the actual answer is, we don't know. So I hope you enjoy this video. My last trip last week with our friend Mike, he introduced me to a wonderful non-alcoholic beer. I think it was called Dark Side of the Moon. Made locally in Victoria, BC. Now it was very tasty, so I thought I'd try this one, which is called Sober Carpenter. It's actually from Montreal, so not local, but it's another non-alcoholic beer. We'll see how it tastes. Cheers. Not bad at all. One thing about non-alcoholic beers, they're like 60 or 80 calories per can. So if you're counting calories, way to go. Tastes like real beer. I think this is Finch's favorite park. There's a bit of car noises going by on the highway. He's being cautious. One of the challenges of this particular spot. Although, later on it's fine. Check everything out. He's waiting for those little squirrels to go running by. So yes, we're at Coldstream Campground once again. As you know, one of our favorite places to be in Manning. It's got a nice little loop you can do a short hike on. River just behind us, which I got to play in this morning. It was kind of fun. I'm just behind our van, down by the river. And this may sound funny, but one of the things I've always wanted to do is to cross this river. Usually the river is way too high to really want to consider, or at least consider it safely. Or at least it's high enough you want to think twice. But right now, it's very low. I couldn't even get my pack raft to float here. So I'm going to try and head across. My identity will get a bit wet, but I'm wearing my beach shoes, if you will. They're not the best, but hopefully enough to cross. Ooh, and the water's cold. It's about 9 degrees out this morning. Oh, it's so shallow. It's barely above my ankles. So I'm pretty certain that on the other side of the river, the park's even more magical. It's not hard, but my feet are freezing. It's the deepest part. Okay, climb up the bank. And here we are. Oh yeah, this is definitely worth crossing the river for. Still, that's nice. There's our van. One thing to check off the list. This is kind of a different trip, because we really kind of don't know where we're going. Yeah, we're sort of heading north, but we're not sure exactly. I've made some tentative bookings, but we never know what's going to happen. We have wildfires in B.C. right now. Yeah, a lot of smoke everywhere, so we're not keen on going anywhere where there's a lot of smoke, and obviously we don't want to get close to the fires and cause any challenges that way. Actually, that pretty much leaves only Vancouver Island, if we really wanted to go anywhere. And we're doing that later this month. And we've got a long weekend coming up, and we're just going to head out and see where we end up. As Mickey said, we have a couple of spots to book. We're at Sun Peaks for the next few days. Yeah, and then we're going to kind of wing it from there. We may end up going home. We may end up going somewhere else. We'll see. All right, we're off. All right, so we'll see what happens, but enjoy the adventure with us. Staying with sort of a non-alcoholic beer kick, Phillips Iota Hazy IPA. Interesting, and Mickey picked up a nice red wine. An arctic char and a vegan bolognese. Looks good. I'll see you later. Mickey's going up to do a hike on Sun Peaks. We were here a few years ago, and it's really enjoyable up there. Hopefully, if the flowers are as nice as they were when we were here before, that'd be great. So I'm staying behind simply because the van's out in the sun, and the temperature out right now is maybe 20 degrees, but it could get warm, and we're a little worried about finch. So I'll stay behind for this morning and let her enjoy a hike. I'm going to relax, read a book. It's nice. So I'm on the chairlift by myself up to close to the top, and then I'll do a short hike. So I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully, there's still some nice wildflowers up there. It was a good night. Nice and quiet in the RV overnight section at Sun Peaks Resort. It's the P2 parking lot, and $25 a night. It's now Friday of the long weekend, so there's lots of RVs there. But it was a good night, and it cooled down really nicely, which was great. I'm seeing some lovely wildflowers already. Gorgeous. There's a lot of trails closed today due to construction of a new chairlift. Luckily, the one that we took last time called Gills Trail is open. So it's trail number 9. I'll probably just go partway and come back. Gorgeous day. So I bumped into our neighbors Judy and Stuart, camped next to us in their Winnebago Echo on the trail. Judy was having some challenges with a recent injury and decided to work her way back. So Stuart and I ended up hiking together. We saw some smoke from the wildfires nearby as we walked along. We're going to try the quick way back, Saddleback Trail. So we are here at Wells Gray Provincial Park. And we ended up here a day earlier than we thought we might. We were a little concerned about the smoke because there's a big fire south of Kamloops. Actually, there's fires. I think there's three fires kind of surrounding the whole area. But we were good. The first couple of days we were at Sun Peaks. It was beautiful, no smoke. And for a change, Gordon let me go on a hike. We often hike, but we wanted to make sure one of us stayed back. Just concerned about the temperature in the van. And it was kind of a nice lazy day, so I kind of enjoyed it. We really actually enjoyed Sun Peaks. A couple of things. Despite the fact that the parking lot, as our friend Henry Wang said, I sent him a photo, he said, it looks like Mad Max and Thunderdome. But the campsite where we were at was actually, you know, people were quiet, they were respectful. It was really quite nice. It's family oriented. It was so nice to see kids out with their parents going mountain biking. It's just, there's a lot of positive energy. Yeah, I really enjoyed the energy of the families and the mountain bikers. And, like, everyone came back. You never heard them at night. So I was really kind of surprised. I thought it might be a bit loud, just given all the people there. Yeah, and we loved the village too. It's not too big, not too busy. No. Even though it was a long weekend, we didn't see a whole lot of people, which is nice. And we were able to get into restaurants very easily and sit on the patio and enjoy our dinner. Yeah, I think when we were there previously, we kind of described it as Whistler in a few blocks. And it's kind of like that. I just really like it. It's a very nice place to visit. And then, of course, the campgrounds. You have access to a dump station, potable water, and you can use their washrooms as well. Yeah, the ladies' washroom has, like, 10 stalls, and mainly it's just for the campers because you need a code to get in. Yeah. Yeah, and they give you the code when you book. And they encourage you to book online so that you can kind of reserve a space. You can't actually select any site. You just drive through and pick a site for yourself, but you can pay in advance. Yeah, and the other great thing about being there at Sun Peaks is that we had really nice next-door neighbors to us, Judy and Stuart, and we got a chance to get to know them. And I had the opportunity to hike with Stuart. Whereas I held down the home front. Yes. Or the van front. And the fin front. The finch front. What was also nice was they have a nice Winnebago Echo, and so they gave us a little tour. Sometimes referred to as Class B+, but technically a Class C. Very nice. Helped us stay there and be even more enjoyable. Yeah, it was fun to have some great neighbors. And so the only thing, we were actually going to stay another day because we were kind of enjoying it, but A, it was a little concerned about the heat, and B, it started to get smoky. So that morning I went out for my usual sort of wandering around and then noticed there was smoke coming in over the hillside, and you could smell smoke, and so we decided that we really didn't want to do that. So we started to drive with the intention of trying to avoid smoke. And that didn't work out so well. As usual, we actually started driving into the smoke. As we kept driving north on Highway 5, just getting smokier and smokier, and we kind of kept our fingers crossed to see how it is in Wells Gray. And it's still pretty smoky here. You can smell the smoke in the air. And we had ash drifting down. This morning when I got up, I saw ash on our table outside and things. And it was really quite smoky. I was going to do some exercise this morning and just said no. And in hindsight, we probably could have expected it given the fires are all surrounding it, but we were hopeful because sometimes you get these little pockets. I've seen that at Manning where we've had smoke other places, but Manning being clear. So the positive side, we had some nice— last night the sun coming through was orange and kind of pretty. And this morning we went for a little walk down by the river. And the same thing, we were seeing the sun come up and there was that nice orange glow through the trees and on the water. Yeah, so there's always a silver lining, I guess. Or a smoky lining. All right, much quieter than Sun Peaks, isn't it, Finch? Although we really enjoyed it there. This is your view. And when we drove in, it's just about empty. August long weekend. Amazing. I feel some of the smoke is keeping people away. Yeah, it was very smoky on the way in. This isn't bad, actually. He's adding some taco seasoning to some vegan ground. This is our anniversary dinner. We were supposed to have dinner in Sun Peaks tonight, but we left Sun Peaks because it was getting a little smoky and it was actually getting pretty hot. Ground, tomato, lettuce, salsa, avocado, and taco shells. Very simple. And Gordon's got— This time a real beer. We've been trying some of the non-alcoholic beer with a fair amount of success. And I should note, in anticipation that we might be leaving Sun Peaks early, we actually went for dinner the other day and sort of had our anniversary dinner then, just in case. Yeah, we did, yeah. And I've got a Fort Barron's Riesling that I opened yesterday. Here we go. Bon appétit. Bon appétit. So we were both saying this morning how much we enjoyed this campground. It's the Pyramid Campground at Wells Gray Provincial Park. It's sort of halfway, I guess, up the park. And it's beautiful, beautiful. First come, first serve. All of the sites, about 50 of them, are pretty private. Yeah, it's very nice. There's a lot of double sites, too, we noticed. But, you know, here it is a long holiday weekend in British Columbia. And, you know, we're here. I would say when we came in, maybe 10 or 15 percent of the sites were taken. As Mickey said, there's some nice sites. You know, lots of open ones if you recharge your batteries and your solar. We found one with very limited sun so that we could keep the van a little cooler. At least try and keep it at the same temperature as the air, which was warm. So, yeah, we really like it here. We've been here before. It's quiet, especially compared to Sun Peaks, too. Well, we do hear the river, but that's a nice sound. Yeah, the river is very close to us. We can just hear it. I mean, not close enough to see, but close enough to hear it. And if it wasn't for the fact that it's going to be really warm and probably going to stay smoky, we'd probably stay longer. Yeah, so we don't really know what we're going to do now from here on. We don't have any... We have a few tentative reservations, but sort of next week, which we might end up canceling anyway. But we're just going to see. We're going to go to drive back down to Clearwater where we can get cell reception and take a look at some of the areas we're thinking about and check the weather. See what the weather is like. If it's smoky, then this is probably going to be our last main stop, maybe stop somewhere on the way home. But we really don't want to stay out if it's going to be smoky. And that was kind of the whole start of our trip was to try and avoid it without doing huge long drives, obviously. We've got Finch taking over half the seat right now, and I've got a little blanket I had on there just to make sure he doesn't scratch the weather. Yeah. So we hope you enjoyed our trip through Manning Park, Sun Peaks, and Wells Gray, the Pyramid Campground at Wells Gray Provincial Park. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I mean, Manning's just always, as you know if you watch our channel, it's our dependable cool weather. Once the sun sets, cools down, usually you can get a shaded site, which is important in the summer if we're trying to keep the van a little cooler. Sun Peaks, again, you know, I enjoyed it. It was fun. Despite the fact it sort of looks like a Mad Max Thunderdome sort of setting in that parking lot when it's busy, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, and we had to escape a day earlier than we expected because of all the smoke. You know, we certainly are concerned for the people that have the forest fires around them, and having to deal with that smoke on a daily basis would be tough. So we hope that the communities that are impacted, you know, we'll certainly see some better weather soon. Yeah. So we hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, please be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already. And stay tuned for our continuing adventure towards, I think, the Canadian Rockies. Yeah. We'll see you next time. See you next time. ♪♪♪♪