Good morning! Greetings from Canada!

So day 17 started slowly. I woke up at the motel and packed my bags into the panniers of the bike, had a wash and as I was getting up off the bed my back went into a seizure of some sort and all the muscles just pulled together leaving me arched over in agonising pain! For a few minutes I couldn’t move or stand up and I only had 5 minutes to check out of the motel!

I gave it my all and managed to stand with a crooked back and for the whole day it gave me grief.
I had arranged to meet up with Tim “Possible” from Switzerland (who I met earlier in my trip) today in Kamloops so we can ride out to Vancouver together!
He was still 132 miles out to the east in Revelstoke.
In the messages he had sent me the day before he told me he needed tyres for his bike as they were running low on tread, so I went to a Starbucks for wifi and started calling around the motorbike shops in Kamloops to source some tyres for him to speed up the process a little.

After calling three shops I found one that had a set of tyres in stock and would fit them for him today when he got into town.

I messaged Tim and told him the good news and decided to ride out there to the bike shop and see what the place was like and put a face to voice I heard on the phone.
The bike shop is called RTR and is Honda and KTM dealership. They have a load of dirt bikes and road bike to choose from and a few CanAm spiders and recreational quads 4×4’s !
I spoke with Paul the manager and told him Tim was on his way!

Feeling peckish I went back to a coffee shop near RTR and sat down and waited.

I was in no rush, and it would be nice to be riding with Tim again out to the Pacific coast.

I read the news (meh), updated this blog, looked at routes to ride around on Vancouver and on Victoria island and drank more coffee.

It was nice to have a slow day and watch things go by in Kamloops.

After an hour or two (2pm) Mr Tim Possible had arrived in town from Revelstoke and checked his bike in to have the tyres changed. (Two tyres, 1 hour job maximum hey?)

We we hungry and we asked the bike shop manager Paul to recommend a good place for lunch, he was just going for his and so we joined him at a local bar and had lunch and beer!

I had a turkey club sandwich and poutine! Mmmmm poutine.

We talked about our travels and Paul told us about his and places we could ride to and places to see. Good times all round.
At 5.30pm Tim’s Triumph had new shoes and a bill of $700cad, 2 X tyres and 2.5 hours labour! (Wow). I thought 1 hour maximum. He thought 2. We were both wrong. Regardless of the bill we were set to go and finally rolled out of Kamloops westward towards Vancouver!

The plan was to ride for about an hour or so and find a campsite for the night and in the morning head for the coast.

We rode out through Kamloops (which by the way is a dessert town and reaches 40c most days in the summer and gets hotter in the evening rather than cooler!) passing Kamloop lake and into the rolling, sloped hills of the dessert.

At one point at the top of a hill was a sign for a ghost town, so I stopped to take a look. I rode into the gravel driveway and parked the bike.

There was a sign saying “photography strictly forbidden”
It was a mock up of an old western town complete with a little street with fake shops on, and all the props you would imagine.

There were even wax dolls behind the Windows!

I walked into the town and looked for signs of life.

Nothing. Hello! I shouted. Nothing.

Only the sound of rock and roll being played from a set of speakers in the fake saloon!

How Strange, but then again, it was a ghost town !!

We rode on the through the dessert valleys and passed the town of Cache Creek on the 97, then turned into the 99 towards Lillooet where we started looking for camp grounds.

After 5 miles or so we saw the sign for the Marble Canyon campground.

Thumbs up from me and we pulled in to the gravel side road and down to the camp site, which was just gorgeous. There was one spot left for Tim’s tent and plenty of trees for my hammock!

My hotel for the night!

Marble Canyon is a very small campground. Maybe 15 pitches, it’s sits back from the road on the banks of the most gorgeous lake which is surrounded by the canyon on one side.

What a find! A superb location and not many mosquitos!

We set up camp and then decided to ride to the next town along of Pavillon to find some dinner.

When we reached pavilion through some awesome twisty roads we discovered it was not really a town at all, not even a village, not even a shop! So dinner would be beer and cookies! Great!

We rode back to camp and the not even village dog chased us out to boot!
On the way back I had my second encounter with a black bear! The road was flanked on the left by a sloping hill and on the right flat lands leading to the lakes. Ahead on my right hand side I saw a big black head pop out of grassy fence line! It was a black bear! I slowed down and it bolted across the road about 50 feet ahead of me and ran up the hill on the left!

I guess the sound of my exhaust rumbling through the valley must have scared it enough to running out!

How cool though!?! Very cool!!
We got back to camp and went to the waters edge and met a young lad called Justin from Vancouver who is studying at Uni in Kamloops. He had a fire going welcomed us to join him. He has an interest in photography and was camping out to get some good pictures of the stars and Milky Way.

We helped him find more fire wood and settled in to the night laying on the banks of the lakes looking up at the stars.

Eventually the Milkyway came out and we saw an abundance of shooting stars with a couple of cool trail blazers across the nights sky

We saw two UFO’s also. Nothing likening I had seen before. Way up in space a kind of bright object flashed in and out of vision in different places with no line of trajectory. Very strange indeed. Defiantly not a satellite. Aliens perhaps?
We are not alone! Aliens and bears lurk around at night!

Thanks for reading!
Jools