Monday, March 30, 2015 (Travel to Monck Provincial Park, Quilchena, BC)

It was 9:00 when we pulled out of the RV Park and back onto highway 97...heading north to Canada...and BC...the final leg of our journey north. It was another gorgeous day!

The Okanogan River...and a beautiful valley...

Lots of orchards and vineyards...

The town of Orville, WA is just a few miles before the border...about a 50 minute drive from Omak. We pass by many orchards on Osoyoos Lake just before reaching the border. The lake continues into Canada...

As we were approaching the border, there are signs advising of the current wait times to cross...less than 5 minutes it said...HA! Never believe these signs...we waited and crept along. Out of five wickets they only had one open. As we finally reached it they opened a second one and the lineup behind was as far as you could see...

40 minutes later we were in Beautiful British Columbia!

Beautiful views of Osoyoos Lake as we turned onto highway 3 west and started to climb. This is new territory for us...

Our first glimpse of snow on the distant mountains...

The scenery was absolutely spectacular...

The beautiful little town of Keremeos...

Similkameen River...

Snow on the river bank...

We turned onto highway 5A at Princeton and headed north...

The first of many lakes along this highway...

We only saw two vehicles heading in our direction the whole way, however there were lots of semi's coming our way...

Fisherman in a pontoon boat...

Ice on this lake...

We turned onto highway 97C for the final trek into Merritt...

We had a little mist coming down on us for a short distance...

We had to stop in Merritt to fill our fresh water tank. We have full hook-ups in the compound where we will be staying, but the water isn't turned on yet...hopefully sometime this coming week.

After filling up at the Merritt City Park, Claybanks, we were finally on our last leg of our journey north...our destination, Monck Provincial Park.

About 9 miles northeast of Merritt, we turned off highway 5A onto Monck Park Road...and the start of the Nicola Lake...

Now we start to climb...

Down we go...

After 10 miles on a paved, but lumpy road, we arrived at the entrance to Monck Provincial Park. Doug and Toni, the park managers, were waiting at the gate to let us in. They had just arrived a couple of hours before us...

We parked the rig just before the gatehouse and walked up the road into the compound to check out the area. We were greeted by Doug, Sue and Tucker...they had arrived a few days earlier. We will be their neighbours up in the compound while Doug and Toni have a site down in the main campground. We were so surprised to find that Doug and Sue had been hard at work clearing the site next to them...the other site designated for work campers. Last year there hadn't been anyone in it and when a load of firewood arrived, the pallets had been put in the site. Doug and Sue had taken enough of the the pallets containing the firewood apart to make room for us and re stacked them further away. Awesome...thanks so much, guys!

After checking out the area, Steve went down to bring the rig up. Unfortunately, we don't have very good pictures of the area (yet) but after some maneuvering, he managed to turn the rig around and back into the site. The tricky part was that he couldn't straighten out the truck because of lack of room, so we had to unhitch at quite an angle which we had never done before. But luckily it worked and we were soon getting all set up.


It was after 4:30 by the time we were all set up...time to go next door to Sue and Doug's place for happy hour and dinner.

At about 6:00 Toni and Doug came up and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner...Hamburger soup and fresh bread...delicious! Thanks, again, Sue and Doug! I think we are really going to enjoy have you as neighbours this summer!