On the road again

Friday 13th September

We hadn’t set our alarms to allow ourselves to lie in after our epic hike yesterday. However, our sore bodies woke us up early still. We got up, got ready and packed up our things and checked out of our accommodation, as we were moving on today.

We drove into Whistler village centre and parked the car so we could wander (/hobble) around the village a bit more before getting back on the road.

We walked past a bakery called ‘Purebread’, which one of our new Canadian friends from yesterday had recommended, so we decided to get a pastry to share. We got a chocolate almond croissant, which was delicious!

We then walked further into the village and came across the Olympic rings from the 2010 winter Olympics that were held in Whistler.

We continued wandering round and in and out of the shops.

We really loved Whistler and the place we were staying so hoped one day to return, maybe for some skiing!

At about 11:30am we got in the car to start our driving for the day. We were going to be driving a total of 6.5 hours to finish in Revelstoke, but with stops along the way. It was a good way to let our legs rest though from yesterday!

There was some beautiful scenery along the way that kept us occupied. We first stopped around 1pm just in a lay-by on the side of the road (as there weren’t many actual stopping places because we were quite remote now). But this lay-by had a lovely view that we could admire while we ate our packed lunch (a focaccia sandwich) that we had picked up from the Purebread bakery.

We both had to go for a nature wee, but had our wits about us and didn’t stop for too long as we were in grizzly bear territory – the scariest kind!

We continued on with the driving, taking it in turns. It was hard to take photos, while the car was moving, that did it justice, but this was the kind of scenery we were driving through/past pretty much the whole time…

We were passing through a town called Kamloops (at about the 4 hour driving point), so decided to stop for a drink and to go and have a loop at Kamloops viewpoint.

We continued on our journey sharing the driving and eventually arrived in Revelstoke. We found a supermarket where we picked up some bits to cook for dinner and then checked into our Airbnb for the night (a little studio).

It was already about 8pm, so we made our dinner and then got our things ready for tomorrow morning as we were going to be getting up and leaving really early for our day’s plans.

Saturday 14th September

Our alarms went off at 5:30am as we needed to leave at 6am to drive to Golden where we were going to be going white water rafting (both of our first time)! Our white water rafting started at 9:15 and took about 2 hours to drive there, but we had realised yesterday that we were going to be crossing a time zone, so needed to leave an hour earlier (hence the early wake up)!

We packed up the car, checked out of the apartment and were on the road by 6am as planned. Unfortunately the weather was pretty miserable the whole way and showed no signs of changing…

After a 2 hour journey and a bit of a hold up at a closed road, we arrived in Golden at the white water rafting place just in time.

The staff gave us a safety talk about how the day would work and the equipment we would be wearing.

We then got changed into the rafting gear, which at this time of year included many layers (swim suit, sleeveless wetsuit, extra wetsuit top, jumper, splash jacket, wet shoes, helmet, life jacket and mittens) because the river we were going to be rafting on was glacial water and therefore about 4/5 degrees C!

Once everyone was dressed, we all got in a big bus that looked like an old school bus!

We were driven about 20-30 mins away to the Kicking Horse river where we were going to be starting the white water rafting. We were then split up into groups, each with a different guide – ours was called Austin and he was great! We then got into our raft on the river…

Once we got going, Austin taught us some key commands that we needed to know like ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ (the direction he wanted us to paddle), ‘hold on’ (hold onto the central rope in the raft to stop us from falling out the raft into the river if we were going to hit a rock in the water or some waves/rapids) and ‘celebrate’ where we all held our paddles together in the air to celebrate! We rafted 12km down the river for 90 minutes and this was very gentle (only really one section of rapids) to ease everyone in, especially as there were a lot of people who hadn’t done white water rafting before. This gentle part of the rafting trip was also meant to allow everyone to take in the surrounding scenery, which we assumed would have been beautiful had it not been raining and low cloud! The morning part of the trip had been quite chilly, especially as we weren’t doing a lot.

After those 90 minutes, we pulled up on a bank and got out the rafts to stop for lunch – we had a BBQ (probably meant for nicer weather days) but they also had hot chocolate, tea and a lit fire to keep us warm.

Once lunch had finished, we all got back in the rafts to start the afternoon part of the trip. Thankfully the rain had stopped and the sun was trying to come out from behind the clouds. The afternoon was the more exciting part of the trip – we were going to be rafting down 12 more kms of the river for another 90 mins, but this time going through 14 sections of rapids – from grade 2 to grade 4 rapids. I was a little apprehensive before, but it was super fun! Austin taught us some more commands like ‘get down’ and ‘left’ and ‘right’ if we needed to shelter or stabilise the raft. The afternoon was a lot more active as we helped manoeuvre the raft through the rapids and so although we got much wetter from the rapids, being active kept us warm. At one point we also stopped at a glacial waterfall and got to taste the glacial water! 

Unfortunately I don’t have any photos from our white water rafting because we obviously couldn’t take anything with us in the rafts.

When we got to the end, we got out the rafts and were driven back to the base in the bus again. We got changed and warmed up and they gave us all a cold beer to finish.

We were pretty cold to the bone still so we found a nice cafe in Golden called Ethos Cafe where we had hot drinks to warm up.

Tonight we were going to be doing a camping (more like glamping) in the woods experience near Golden, so we got in the car (with the heater on full blast) and drove to Camp Moose Trail. When we arrived, Michael (the host) and his dog Winston greeted us and showed us around the camp site.

We first used the hot tub (powered by a log burner) to warm ourselves up – it was so lovely!

We then dried off and changed and went and made and ate our dinner in the kitchen. During dinner we chatted to another nice couple from Canada who were staying too and doing a similar trip to us.

After dinner, Harry chopped up some wood to light a small fire in the wood burner in our tent. We had really noticed the change in temperature as we have driven more East and into the mountains! We had gone from needing Aircon in the bnbs in Vancouver to needed a fire now in Golden!

As it got a bit darker, I became a bit more weary of the bear situation, so whenever walking round the campsite, we found ourselves singing songs like we did on our hikes. We always seemed to revert to singing ‘teddy bears picnic’ – which we hoped we wouldn’t be!

We got ready for bed and got cosy in our tent, watched a bit of netflix on our iPad and then went to sleep – hoping for an uneventful night of not being disturbed by any animals!