I'm home from visiting the inlaws in the Okanagan. And I thought I'd share some pictures from the road.

When I started out on our 6 hour journey to Winfield, I thought it would be fun to take pictures along the way and string them together in a slide show for my friends. I get to travel fairly often and I have a bunch of friends in the states that live in climates very different than my own, and while I have tried to describe to them what it's like up here across the border.. these pictures ought to be better than I ever could with words.

Except that I've had some issues with the slide show idea. So I'll trim it down a bit and just post them here directly.

Headed out of town from Calgary in the open space of the prairies headed to the Mountains via Banff national park.



Once we crossed into BC the weather started to change and there was a lot more snow and pretty soon it was raining pretty hard.





We came up on the stretch which is known to be the worse for avalanches, so much so that they have tunnels built over sections of the road which are the most prone to it. As we approached one tunnel there were some cars parked and men in reflective vests running about getting things ready to close the road. We think we were the second last car through before they closed it.



When we came out of the tunnel we saw this line up of stopped cars and to the left of the second shot was the National Guard set up with their rocket launcher loading it to shoot at the mountain to create a controlled avalanche. One of the army looking fellows looked really pissed (and I mean PISSED) to see another car come through as they obviously thought the road was already blocked off. But it was mighty fun to see them loading the guns up. But the trip continued.



The above shots were just after coming out of the tunnel area, and the shot on the right is a frozen waterfall. It's rather magnificent isn't it?

Then there was a fair sized stretch that wasn't that appealing to the camera, but before long we came up on the lakes and we could finally relax as we were almost to Kelowna.



And when you see this sign: You officially know you've made it to Lake Country. Lake Country is about a half hour outside of Kelowna and is has all th good nice things you hope to find in the Okanagan. Fruit orchards, wineries, and more lakes than you can see scattered along the hills.

More from the actual trip later.