Kamloops Trips - Part 2

                           


Ric and I spent part of two Christmas seasons with the part of my extended family who live in Kamloops. While that city has an airport, large jets do not land there. Instead the airport is serviced by small short distance aircraft from Vancouver and Calgary as well as Horizon Airlines - the subsidiary of Alaska Airlines - and these planes fly to and from Seattle, Washington. On that first trip I flew from Toronto to Vancouver where I connected with Ric and we flew on to Kamloops.

The next trip was different. It was decided that I fly there a day earlier so I could have a good visit with my youngest sister, Babs Gibson. My itinerary was from Toronto to Calgary and then the smaller aircraft over the mountains to Kamloops. The jet from Toronto to Calgary was loaded and the engines were started. However, the intake areas on the right hand side of the aircraft began spewing blue smoke. As a result we were all told to vacate the aircraft and wait for a replacement. This took an hour which made it too late for me to connect with the small aircraft in Calgary. Instead, Air Canada put me up in the Holiday Inn - complete with a voucher for dinner in the hotel dining room followed by a lengthy wait at the airport the next morning.

I did arrive in Kamloops before Ric but his flight was no more than an hour behind mine. We stayed with my niece, Teri, and her family. Teri's husband, Paul Denis, was working in Alberta and was not home so Ric failed to meet him. During the following summer my brother-in-law, Leo Poirier, passed away so we flew to Kamloops once again where we were met by Darlene who drove us up to 100 Mile House.

It was there that Ric finally met Paul who, at first, was very shy and diffident but, as Ric is not comfortable around crowds of strangers either, they spent most of the time together smoking cigars - and bonded!

Two Christmases later we spent part of the holiday in Kamloops and Christmas Eve and Day at 100 Mile House. The photos which I will now attach are of the two Christmas seasons in Kamloops. As you will note - quite different in terms of the weather!

Not far from where Paul and Teri live is a petting zoo and we went there for a walk. The top two photos are of kids in the zoo while the lower photo is of the topography in that part of the North Thompson Valley

 We returned for another visit the following Christmas when the weather was much more 'Canadian'!

The final note before closing is of a forest fire that threatened in August 2004. There were fires all around the area but the most dangerous one began in the sawmill village of Barriere (about 10 miles north of Kamloops) and raced along the mountain flanks on the east side of the North Thompson River. The Denis family was put on evacuation alert but, except for a couple of embers which landed upon their roof, they were unharmed. Here is a photo taken by somebody else of that conflagration