In the Okanagan -after the second try!

Well, we're now up in the Okanagan after an unsuccessful attempt yesterday afternoon. We had tried coming up yesterday, being concerned that it was going to snow in the lower mainland on Saturday (today,now). We made it as far as Hope and found out the Coquihalla Highway was closed. I presume it must have been pretty bad winds and/or snow up at the top. We had just had another bad winter storm in Vancouver which meant VERY strong winds with many trees down and hundreds of thousands of people without power along with very heavy rains. I can't remember a year this bad for storms -- I think the highest gusts were 159km/hr. Of course this meant severe winter conditions on the mountains so we decided to turn around and give it another try in the morning. Well, God was good and we were rewarded with a very nice clear day with a trace of corn snow that had fallen at night. The roads had a lot of compact snow with a lot of ice too. They were ice blading so that meant a lot of "groovy" driving. We had a close call coming up to the Coquihalla Summit as I was just passing a rig when we came up to a car sitting sideways across the road, leaving just enough room to get by on the left side. The young guy who was driving was angrily brooding over his big dent in the side of the car. It looked like he slid over to his left and hit the median with the middle of the car -- fortunately he didn't flip or roll. We also saw a semi that had jack-knifed and a couple more semis that looked like they had been off the road for a couple of days. My sisters had been two hours late coming up to Kelowna from White Rock on the Greyhound on Thursday due to the blizzard they had come through ( they closed the highway behind their bus). So God protected us and we made it to Kelowna in about 4 hrs ( not bad for how bad the roads were).

Mom and Dad's place is in a bit of chaos as they are just finishing restoring the hardwood floors -- so almost all the furniture from the main floor is in the sitting room. We had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch in the midst of the furniture and then headed off for Lake-Land Suites (Carr's Landing, Lakeland Country) which is the B&B place that belongs to Werner and Angelica Weiss. Theyare our old time friends that offered mom to put us up til their house is back in order on Monday.

We will be sharing for a few minutes at Vernon Christian Fellowship in the morning. It will be good to see old friends there.