June Holiday

Ok folks. I know that I haven't written in a while and been bloody busy but here I am again. The last week of June I had a week off so Mark and I went up to the Sunshine Coast. For those of you that don't know it, it's still the mainland north of here, but there are some big, big inlets so you have to take a ferry to get up there. We actually went right to the end which is 2 ferries. We had a 3 day kayaking trip in Desolation Sound. It only rained a little bit, but lucked out on the weather since having some overcast skies are nice for kayaking in. We had our own little island to camp on by ourselves and did day trips from there.





We, then, decided to hike part of the Sunshine Crest Trail. It's 180km route from the end of the peninsula past Lund and goes all the way to the ferry terminal at Saltery Bay. The last 100km hadn't been cleared from the winter fall downs, overgrowth and snow so we were just going to so the first part. It was great that we found out about this as you can't find too many backpack trips to do at that time of year that aren't still covered in snow. The first part of the trail has a lot of road access points so it's easy to organize or just do day hikes on it. We took a water taxi from Lund to the very tip of the peninsula to where the start of the trail can be found. Had a great hike to a lake - again all by ourselves and didn't see any one else on the trail that day. The next day was getting really, really rainy and our feet were soaked. We ran into some trail maintenance people and they mentioned that it supposed to rain for the next couple of days also. After a few choice words between us, we decided just to bail out and look for somewhere that was going to be sunny.



So, off to Penticton we went. It looked like the best place to go for weather and for the activites that we'd both be happy doing. We went and rode most of the Ironman bike course the next day. Mark was such a trooper as he'd prefer to be mountain biking and had never been on a road bike for that long. It was good for me to ride the course again and get used to what I'm in store for. The next day we went rock climbing at the Skaha Bluffs which I had never been to, but has such amazing climbing there. We got to this place that Mark thought would be good for both of us to climb at as he's a much better climber than myself. We were getting ready to climb and some guys came up and mentioned that someone had died on that wall the day before and sure enough there was some blood stained rocks that we hadn't seen. We did find out that it was a rappelling error and had nothing to do with the rock or the bolts along the route. Scary what a little miscommunication can do. We kind of took it easy climbing after seeing that though. It turned out that Mark, as well as another friend, had known that gal who had passed away. I love that Mark is such a stickler for safety. Anyways, the weather turned out great and was a good time away. Although we were busy, we still had our time to relax. We also survived a week together :).