Banff (43) to Kelowna (44)

Well, I knew that driving through the Rockies at some stage may be exciting, and I'm using that word very loosely! Prior till today, I thought I had seen Grace reach all her physical and emotional limits, but I have never seen Grace this stressed, indeed so stressed that for the very first time I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye, Grace pull out her Rosary beads. Now, this in itself is very unusual because Grace is not Catholic!

I didn't want to say anything to the family but I was a little concerned early in our drive as the outside temperature had dropped to about minus 2. Black ice kept going through my mind, but I needn't have worried as there was quite a bit of traffic and the sun was shining. Passing through some of the passes was a concern, but the views more than made up for that as we went through.

For over 4 hours after leaving Banff, we descended through some very steep sections of the Canadian Rockies. At the risk of repeating myself, to say again that I'm impressed with the Chev is an understatement. When the trailer switch is activated, it brings the Allison transmission into play and that senses when you are descending and braking. It automatically changes down gears depending on how hard you are braking and for how long.

I have no idea whether this will eventually take some sort of toll on the gearbox or engine, but it is fantastic. The big 6.6 litre diesel starts to get louder and rev higher as the gears change down, but I have never seen the tacho above 3,700 RPM.

To give an idea of the revs, when we are on flat road pulling the Sierra, in 6th gear (it's an automatic gearbox but has the option of manually changing gear if you wish) travelling at 100 kph, we are doing about 1,700 RPM, really just chugging along!

Anyway, the gearbox and engine certainly got a workout during our decent. I suppose the sound of the engine roaring didn't help Grace and I haven't checked her floor for footprint indentations in her firewall, but I'm sure if I did look, I'd probably find some. She has stated that she never wants to see the Rockies again in a rig like ours. The Rockies train sounds really good, to her!

At some stage the road had to start to flatten out because the temperature wasn't getting warmer, a great indicator to let us know we weren't descending into the bowels of the earth. And level out we finally did, about 4 ½ hours east of Banff, by then well and truly into British Columbia.

Homer found another short cut for us; at times it felt like we were driving up some farmer's private driveway, very narrow and often only wide enough for us. Almost nine kilometres in all and very luckily (again), we only saw one oncoming vehicle along the way. We slowly inched past each other, then we wound up joining another slightly larger road at a T intersection. To this day I don't know whether or not we saved time or distance as I can't find our "shortcut" on the travel planning software we're using.

We ended up going alongside a beautiful looking lake that we later found out to be called Mara Lake. It seemed to be very large as we drove along its banks for about 20 minutes. However, as we were driving along, we could see what looked like fish floating on the surface, many, many of them.

We pulled up where we could, hopped out to have a look and were struck by the smell of rotting fish. Both on the shore and floating about were what we suppose were salmon that had died after reaching their destination to spawn their eggs.

We arrived at Kelowna and the campground was very nice, but primarily being used as a retirement village. The internal roads were reasonably narrow and they only had "back-in" sites. They were very polite but many of the facilities had "only over 19 years of age" limit. There was a good playground but not particularly conducive for us to stay there for more than our planned 3 nights.

Their internet connection was great, not in the Sierra but in a room beside the pool that also had a library, once again only for those older than 19. Vancouver is our next destination and we selected the nearest campground to the city that didn't require us to drive through the city of Vancouver.