It's All About the Journey...

 I started this post three weeks ago.....good grief..... so what I'm writing about here took place three weeks ago.

Last Sunday at the Farmer's Market, one of our customers mentioned to me that she missed my blog.  I know, I don't know what happened, the blogging break wasn't intentional, but it just seemed to become too much effort.  When I thought of it I didn't even know where to start.  I had lots of things I could blog about, but just thinking of what to blog about made me move on to something else.

So here I am, giving it another go.

We've still been continuing on with the Sunday Farmer's market.  To retire, scale back, continue on as we are; all the options are going through my mind.  I love the market, and at times I want to be done with it it, badly.  I have pretty strong anti-market feelings sometimes, but that's usually on a Saturday evening when it's getting dark and I'm running out of time to get all done that needs to be done......  Then Sunday morning comes around and we are setting up our booth and it is all good.

  We have been going to the White Rock Farmer's Market for 20 years now.  We are the only vendor remaining from that first year.  I bet we have only missed about a dozen markets in all those years, if that.  I have decided this year that if I don't get done what I think I should have got done, it's all good, the world won't end, a few customers might be a bit disgruntled, but oh well....we'll all survive.

We went to Oliver this week.  As usual just a two night stay.  Since we leave on Tuesday morning, at a half decent hour (although in this hot spell there was an awful lot of plants to water and look after before we left), we feel like it isn't quite as much as a rush to get there, so let's enjoy the journey.

  This time we decided to take a trip to the alpine meadows at Manning Park.  We tried on the last trip, but the gate was closed part way up because the snow hadn't melted yet.  The last time we were there was when the kids were little, in the early '90s.

I had been told that the end of July was the best time, and in my mind's eye was seeing meadows of flowers, maybe Julie Andrews running across it, or Heidi off in the distance😀

It was a bit disappointing in the flower department, but the hairy Western Anenome was pretty cool to look at.

A few patches of Indian Paintbrush

It was warm, almost hot up there, but lovely skies and vistas, and the bugs were bearable.

Luna spotted something on the trail.  I don't think she could figure out what it was, as usually she doesn't pay too much attention to birds.

I think it was considering having a dust bath, but as we got closer, it headed for cover.

I tiptoed off the trail (we weren't supposed to leave it) and got this shot.  Grouse or Ptarmigan, Google didn't really help me decide which.

Then Luna got the border collie crouch going, and the stare, and notice her right foot, she's got the pointer stance going too.

What to do, what to do, which one to go for, now there's four, do you see them.  No worries, she wasn't allowed to do anything more than you see here.

On the drive up, there were some incredible views of snowy peaks all around.  Oh, and washboardy roads, bad, very bad, and even worse going back down. It took us 15 minutes to travel 4.5 miles coming down.  Thankfully after that, by the viewpoint, we were back on pavement.

A patch of Heather

A bit of an uphill slog back to the parking lot.  It was hot and we had had enough, and it was time to continue on with the journey.

The next stop was about 10 minutes down the road close to the halfway mark of our drive.  We pulled off where there are some rough campsites along the Similkameen River and stopped to let the dogs have a swim and play in the water.  This really means that we throw sticks out into the water and they bring them back, over and over and over again.

On to Keremeos where we stopped to pick up some fruit.  80 lbs of peaches and apricots.  Seconds, which are perfect for jam, for $.35 lb!  We parked the car in the shade and sat next to it on a picnic table and the fruit stand owner brought us some samosas.  A mid afternoon lunch. 

Onward. 

We took the northern route from  Keremeos and stopped at Yellow Lake.  It is a popular fishing lake.  Oxygen is pumped into the lake to help the fish, as they would otherwise die off.  As to why it is called Yellow Lake....well your guess is as good as mine.  

I just about went for a dip, as those concrete squares were all slippery with algae in the lake, so I had to make sure I kept my feet on the gravelly bits in-between. 

A funny story on this trip at this lake.  Luna ran out on the dock and leapt into the water on the left side of the wide part at the end.  The water was all thickly covered in that scummy algae you can see to the right.  Underneath the algae was a bunch of rotting logs and crappy stuff.  A bit of a dead water area between the dock and the shoreline which curved out there. Luna has never been on a dock before, that I can remember.  Did she think she was jumping onto land?  The algae did look pretty solid....Anyway she disappeared right under the algae, thankfully popped back up and then swam and scrambled to get to the shore.  Well then lo and behold she ran out to the wide part of the dock again, and went off the other side into the clear water.  She caught her foot a bit on a mooring cleat, so she ended up diving in like a human, head first straight down into the water.  I've got to admit we sure had some laughs at her two dock diving attempts!  I guess it put her off a bit because after that she ran just onto the first part of the dock and jumped off into the shallow water where she could touch the bottom.

This time our trip to Oliver took us twice as long as usual, but we enjoyed ourselves getting there.