Roadtrek Zion Campervan at Shuswap Lake, BC

You like to snoop the camera, don't ya? Are we ready to go Presh? Are we ready to go? You ready to go? No? Want to drink some more? So here we are in Hope again at the rest stop. And we are on our way. Pretty exciting. We've got a whole week this time. Our first stop will be at the Shuswap Provincial Park. And after that we're going to head over to Glacier National Park. And we might also go to Yoho. And then we'll head over to Jasper. So we've got a pretty exciting trip coming up. The weather is not looking that great at the moment. But the forecast is for most of BC to be sunny for at least the next few days starting tomorrow, Sunday afternoon. So we're hopeful that we'll have some warm autumn weather for our trip. Beautiful fall colors. Here's our site at Shuswap Lake Provincial Park. One of many. I think they have a few hundred sites. We're at 230. A little drier here than the west coast but still lots of trees. Reasonable space between the other sites. You can see we've actually just thrown some firewood underneath the back of the van to keep it dry. And hopefully it stays dry. It's a bit wet right now. Perimeter trail that goes around the campground and alongside the lake. Little island off to our right. It looks like it might be option for a paddle tomorrow morning if the weather's nice. Yeah, nice picnic sites for day use. I think in the summer this is a very, very busy park. Right now it looks like it's best maybe half or a third full. This would be a choice spot for day use picnicking. Yeah, pretty nice. So there's one kilometer of beach. And that's Copper Island where you can paddle over reasonably easily or take a boat of some sort. There might even be a dock on the far right hand side of it. And scoot around the island for a little bit of a hike which we might be able to do tomorrow. OK, we're going to try the 20 minute nature trail around the nature house which is closed for the season. You can see how the land's recessed and then they build some sort of a foundation on top of that and then it's interesting the ladder you'd go out of once it was completely filled in then you'd go out through the roof. It wouldn't be bad today, you'd have the place all to yourself. Yeah, it looks like with the overflow I mean it's not great but it looks pleasant enough it was overflow and it looks like you have washrooms ahead as well and of course your one minute walk to the lake. Assuming that this is the dog beach area here. So from here on, no dogs. But there's lots of spots for Fido to play. It's peaceful and quiet here post-summer season at Trishaw Lake. And the weather hasn't been that great today so I think it just stopped raining so there's not a lot of day use people here. But nice and peaceful, really nice. Give us a smile. Nice and quiet now. Don't know if this would be my place in the summer but it looks gorgeous now. Success! We're just having a simple dinner tonight. Split pea soup which looks like it's going to spill over. Some olives, some cheese, some nice bread and that's about it. I'm having some wine, Gordon's having a sip of beer and a nice simple dinner. But hearty enough because the split pea soup is pretty hearty. Well good morning, it's a little after 7am I think about 7.15, about 9 degrees outside. I'm considering going for a paddle to the little island that we saw yesterday, Copper Island. And the wind's starting to come up a little bit which is giving me a bit of concern The weather's coming in from the west which is nice and clear and sunny so it should improve, but it's going to be a little breezy. This is fine, but if it gets too much, too windy it becomes a little difficult to be out in the packraft. Right now I've got some friends joining me on the beach. Anyway, hopefully a good paddle and most of my friends seem to have moved out into the water to join me. Alright, so I'm over on the island, actually a fairly easy trip. It started a little windy though, a bit concerning more just for the trip back. Don't see any obvious trails but I'll see if I can work my way part way up the island and get a better view. If I don't go the whole way, that's fair enough for this trip. We can always come back. Alright, so I seem to have found a bit of a trail not well-worn in, but it certainly looks like people or maybe some animals have come up and down here reasonably frequently. A little steep Good, good way to warm up in the morning. Almost at the top, I think. And now, as luck would have it, I've found the proper trail up the island. So that's the route I'll take out. I'll probably have to walk a bit along back on the beach. So I'm heading back now, and as you've seen from the bench up here as expected, a lot of people come up here. I was surprised I couldn't see a trail but now that I'm up here, I've actually found the proper trail down. It looks much easier than the shortcut I took, and hopefully it'll lead me close to back where my boat is and then I'll just sort of backtrack along the rocky shore to get to where I landed. So as you've seen, there's actually a proper trail on the island that I ended up cutting up onto. The challenge is that wherever it starts from, and you can see it carries on, I think it might actually go around the island and then probably start at the other side. Really intended for people arriving here in powerboats. So I'm actually going to scoop back down through the forest to try and find where I've left my boat. Otherwise I'm going to be a substantive distance away from where I started. So it'll mean another shortcut through some bush like this, but generally that's not too bad. With a little bit of route finding, I found my way back to where I landed and I'm going to launch from. We just left Shuswap Lake Provincial Park. We only stayed there for one night. So Shuswap Lake is quite a developed lake and it's a very popular summer holiday destination for people in BC and probably also from Alberta as well because we're not too far from the province of Alberta. So there's lots of homes, there's a lot of boats, a lot of activity, and yeah, not as quiet and wild as we usually like and essentially it was just an overnight stop for us so that's okay. But it was a nice campground, lots of campsites, lots of room between sites and yeah, it was good. It was a good stay for us. And the original plan was to go to Glacier National Park and stay there for a few nights, but we checked the weather and unfortunately the overnight lows are going to be less than zero degrees, so below freezing and we're a little bit concerned because we're not winterized and we don't want our pipes to freeze and break so we're sort of open our plans are open at the moment we're just going to drive over there anyway just to check things out and if it ends up being too cold then we might end up somewhere further south who knows exactly where but we will keep you posted. So if you're on YouTube and you look at some of the individuals who are living full time in their RVs they often talk about chasing 70 degrees Fahrenheit, so being in places where it's always about 70. We on the other hand are just chasing zero or anything above zero, in terms of zero degrees Celsius so 32 degrees Fahrenheit as Mickey said, we're okay if it's just minus one or minus two at night for a few hours, that's not going to be a problem, but if it's minus seven, which is what Glacier I think was forecast to be tonight, and it stays that way for several hours then we do run the risk of potentially freezing our water lines or grey or black tanks so our options are effectively we go a little farther south and as we say we're chasing zero at the coldest, or we stop somewhere en route and pick up some RV antifreeze and we simply winterize it. Winterizing is actually going to be fairly fast for us, it's just that if we're going to be using and we will be using the van in a lot of other areas later then we'd have to de-winterize so just a bit of a challenge, that's all. And also we originally had reservations at Jasper for Thursday and Friday night and we're not exactly sure if we're going to be able to do that as well, depending on the temperature so basically for the next week we're just going to wing it and see what happens and see where we end up. music