Day 16 - Field to Revelstoke

We had a slow start this morning, breakfasting at Truffle Pigs, then checking out of The Kicking Horse Lodge and going for a brief walk around the town of Field (it's so small a brief walk is the only kind you can have, otherwise you start doing laps). On the way round we bumped into Sean Cunningham, one of the co-owners of Truffle Pigs, and the person who had checked us into the hotel the day before. He's such a friendly, open and honest bloke, and was keen to find out our opinion of the restaurant. I told him I had been expecting a choice of burgers and pizzas, not gourmet cooking, and he laughed and said that they do get some people going into the restaurant expecting that sort of fast food, and walking out five minutes later when they've seen the menu. He was also interested in which wine we'd chosen, and was effusive about the wine-producing region of BC, which we will be entering the day after tomorrow.

It was a great chat with an interesting guy, and at the end of it we shook hands and he wished us well for the rest of the holiday. Oh, and he also cleared something up - it is Salmon Arm, not Samlon Arm.

We then drove on the few kilometres to Emerald Lake, which is recommended in my Moon guide book, and was also recommended highly by an American couple we had been chatting to in the restaurant last night. When you get there, you can see why. It's another gorgeous lake in a long line of Rocky Mountain gorgeous lakes. Once again the "rock flour" washed down from the mountains mingles with the water to produce that distinctive turquoise colour, as the particles in the water reflect back the blue wavelengths of light from the sun. On this occasion the water was almost mirror-smooth, hardly any breeze upon the surface, and the reflections of the landscape in the lake were stunning.

We'd been told by the American couple we spoke to last night that there was a walk you could do around the lake that took about an hour, ninety minutes at most. We set off on that walk, leaving behind the coachloads of Japanese tourists that had turned up in their brightly coloured plastic macs, meandering our way through the posh and expensive (I know because I looked into booking one) chalets that cluster at this end of the lake. Suddenly the paved path ended, and a woodland path began. The sort of path that leads through woodland. The sort of woodland with bears in it.

Reasoning that a lot of people take this path, and that we could chatter and make a lot of noise to warn bears of our coming, we set off along the walk. We seemed to be the only people going that way (anti-clockwise), because we met a lot of people coming the other way. No bears though, just a couple of squirrels and a very noisy woodpecker.

It was a nice walk, just over 3 miles. Most of it was through pine-forest, with occasional breaks to look out over the lake and mountains opposite. The lake has its own micro-climate, one side of the lake sheltered and sun-warmed, the other wet and winter-blasted. This results in entirely different flora and fauna on either side of the lake, exciting news if you're a flora and fauna fan, but merely a note of passing interest if you're on the watch for bears and also - by this time, for me at least - a washroom.

We got back to the carpark by the early afternoon, found a washroom as a matter of some import, then bought sandwiches and set off for Revelstoke. The plan was to take it easy, driving through Glacier National Park, admiring the views.

Immediately I had my first serious argument of the holiday with the sat nav. Revelstoke, I knew, was two hours west of Golden on Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. And Golden was about an hour from Emerald Lake. The sat nav wanted to take me on a nearly 500 mile, 13 hour journey down Highway 95 through Radium Hot Springs and back up through Nelson (actually part of the journey we'll be taking tomorrow). I ignored the sat nav, and drove on along Highway 1. She'd see my way eventually.

We stopped in a rest area just before Golden and ate our sandwiches looking out over a railway line, a river, and a mountain range. The sat nav was still telling me to turn around at my earliest convenience. Having eaten, we pushed on through Golden. Sean Cunningham from Truffle Pigs had told us that we shouldn't expect a lot from Golden, and he was right, it was a bit of a dump (not helped by the amount of construction going on there). I was glad I'd not picked this town as one of my places to overnight.

By the time we went past a signpost telling us to put our watches back an hour because we were entering Pacific Daylight Time from Mountain Daylight Time (bizarrely the timezones don't change at the provincial borders), the sat nav had capitulated, and our trip through the beautiful scenery of Glacier National Park was uninterrupted.

We got to our hotel in Revelstoke at 16:00 PDT, checked in, found that Spain had won the world cup and that there had been a total solar eclipse in the South Pacific, then had a walk in the sunshine into downtown Revelstoke.

My Moon travel book refers to Revelstoke as a "midsize city of 8,500". Hello, that's not a city. The town consists of a smallish number of roads in a grid pattern, a number of very nice-looking shops (it's Sunday today, so shopping opportunities are limited), a railway line, outlying suburbs, and mountain scenery to kill for. The atmosphere, as is often the case with towns in British Columbia, is redolent of sap and sawdust. It was baking hot as we walked into town, so we stopped to buy ice-creams, sat down... and it started raining. Damn. It was only a shower, and we soon were able to loop through the town and head back to our hotel.

Dinner tonight was a smoked salmon pasta dish for us both at Zala's Steak and Pizza House, a five minute walk from the hotel. It was a lot different to Truffle Pigs, but a chatty canuck waitress called Trista ("well you can tell the difference between a Welsh accent and an English accent, can't you?") added to the enjoyment of the meal.

This holiday seems to be running through my fingers like sand now. Just a few days left. Ghost town tomorrow, wine-producing region the day after. Stick with us.