Last year on my birthday I was in Iceland and I found a pair of Mexican cowboy boots at a store in Reykjavik. The boots were handmade, with exquisite embroidery. Only one pair existed in the store, and when they fit me perfectly, I felt they were destined to be my shoes except for the…
Month: July 2014
Rocky Road Trip Day 6: The Royal Tyrrell Museum
Royal Tyrrell Museum’s paleontology gems Bad food with good vibes Foreign birthday beer They might make fun of their elitist tree-hugging counterparts on the coast of British Columbia, but Albertans aren’t anti-intellectual, anti-sustainability, or anti-government. It’s a kinder, softer version of the American heartland over here. They drive to their megachurches in pickup trucks, but still believe in…
Rocky Road Trip Day 5: Dinosaur Bones in the Badlands
Along with North Korea and the United States, only Canada allows the killing of the unborn. Canada protects endangered species like whales, but not human fetuses. That’s what the billboards told me today, in the Alberta prairies. I shuddered. It wasn’t the billboards, or the giant Christian mega-plex replete with preschool and movie theatre. There was…
Rocky Road Trip Day 4: Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
Today was divided into three parts: The drive through Fernie and through Crowsnest Pass Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump UNESCO site Fort MacLeod First, the scenery unfolds continuously like a NatGeo film reel. Fernie area is especially fetching because the town sits in a tight basin surrounded by mountains. On one side of you are precipitous bald rock faces that slope…
Rocky Road Trip Day 3: The Long Bomb from Oliver to Kimberley
Every road trip has a long bomb: those days it’s better to keep on truckin’. Today was our long bomb. The drive from Oliver in the southern Okanagan to Kimberly in the Kootenay-Rockies takes seven hours, but it’s plenty scenic and there’s stuff to do and drink along the way. The south Okanagan is semi-arid shrub-steppe with sagebrush,…
Rocky Road Trip Day 2: Okanagan Wine and Cheese
Waking up in the Okanagan is really awful. That sense of peace that floods the brain can be unbearable. But I got over it, and managed to leave the house for a day of wine touring and picnicking. Uggggg. So on this ugly warm and pine-scented morning, we said hi to the Okanagan sun (which was…
A Rocky Road Trip: July 2014
Day One has us driving from Vancouver to the Okanagan using Highway 3, through the Similkameen. Josh has done this leg before; I had not. We paused at two fruit wineries: Rustic Roots and Forbidden Fruit. Both had solid fruit wines, with Forbidden Fruit edging out Rustic Roots for overall depth and maturity. But we…
Love and Barley 