BC Tour — Oroville to 100 Mile House

Note: You can see maps of the overall route, and optionally view more details related to the tour at the “BC Tour — Route Maps ” post.

A light rain was falling as we started off from Oroville. It turned into a downpour after a couple of hours on the road. Fortunately we were at the top of a big hill by then. We coasted down the hill for about half an hour at 30 mph. That was a wild ride. Cars drenching us from time to time as they zoomed by. I could see just enough through the drops on my glasses to stay on the shoulder. I wished that I had little wipers on my glasses.

The day before, I borrowed channel-lock pliers at the campsite to adjust my headset (front fork bearings). My bicycle had developed a shimmy, and I hoped that would take care of it. It was one tool I didn’t take with me, but it would have been too heavy to tote anyway. The fork seems to be steady today.

Along with spare parts — chain, rear axle, cones and balls for hub bearings, spare machine screws, brake cables, spare tire, etc. — I was carrying small tools, lubricant, tube repair kit, duct tape, a spare tire and tube, etc. It could ruin your whole day if you were in the middle of nowhere, and didn’t have one of those.

We arrived at Peachland — halfway between Penticton and Kelowna — in good shape, and stopped for the night at Todd’s Tents and Trailers, located on the shore of Lake Okanagan. It was no longer raining by then, but we set up camp right away, just in case. Then we ate some of the fruit leather and dried cherries we picked up along the way. It had been a long hard day.

I had a small 2-man tent, which was big enough to hold all my gear too. It had a large entry with both a screen and waterproof closure. A tour like this would be pure misery without good tents. Between the rain and mosquitoes, we’d have turned back before we got started.

We had spotted “The Pub” down the road a ways. We changed to street clothes, and walked over to have the beer we figured we’d earned. When we got back we cooked a pasta concoction, and ate it along with some of the other grub we had.

We were eating Powerbars and other carbs all day long, but it is always nice to have something hot to eat. Then it started raining again, so we crawled into our tents to sleep. It’s not hard to go to sleep when you’ve ridden over 100 miles, and we wanted to get up early to beat the traffic in Kelowna anyway.

Kewlowna is one of the small cities in BC. We got up early on Sunday morning to beat the city traffic there. A mile long bridge connects West Kelowna with East Kelowna at a narrow spot on Lake Okanagan. There was *zero* traffic when we arrived at that bridge, but also a stern notice to *Walk your bicycle on the sidewalk*. We decided we didn’t want to go to jail in a foreign land, so we complied.

Oh well, we made it across the bridge in half an hour or so.

From here on the scenery just got better (and it wasn’t raining any more). The lakes and hills that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet left behind 500,000 years ago make the Okanagan a beautiful place to live.

It was a long, hard ride over the hills from Vernon to Falkland, which is a small, friendly place. We stayed at the Community Campground for the night. A very talkative volunteer helper was there with his 90 year old “Mum,” and he told us all about the town.

Our route the next day was through Kamloops and on to Cache Creek. Kamloops is a busy city on the main highway from Vancouver to the interior. That highway, with the businesses strung along it, reminded me of Route 66 through Albuquerque in the 1950s. The rest of Kamloops appeared to be a quiet little city. We ate a bunch of burgers and fries there, and moved on.

The highway out of Kamloops is in a busy corridor. The Trans-Canada Highway, the Thompson River, and two busy railroads go through there. The splendid Thompson River was comparable to two side-by-side Spokane Rivers when they are in flood stage. I’m sure the river is named after the matchless explorer, David Thompson.

We were headed for Cache Creek. I enjoy the place names in BC. Many of them are derived from First Nations names. Cache Creek is apparently derived from a hidden cache of supply and trade goods used by fur traders. They would have been from Hudson’s Bay Company, or its rival, North West Company. Our destination, Prince Rupert, was named for Prince Rupert of the Rhine, an English prince who was the first Governor of Hudson’s Bay Company.

Cache Creek was one of the places that Jake Layte told us about. He highly recommended Mike’s Place — excellent food and plenty of it. It was a Chinese restaurant by the time we arrived though, but we ate there anyway. There wasn’t much else to choose from, as I recall.

There’s a nice little campground at Cache Creek (as in about any other place in BC). We talked with a couple who warned us about bears and black flies ahead. (I encountered those black flies later on.) We also met a bunch of riders who were riding from Prince George to Vancouver. (Easy to find — their bicycles were our first clue.) They ran into hail and lightning from the same cold front that drenched us on the way to Peachland.

The owner of the campground was a cyclist too. He told us about his recent ride over the Rockies to Jasper AB. He was up on bicycle technology, so we talked shop. The gear ratio I was using — 1.25 — made climbing steep hills twice as easy as the 0.55 gear ratio he used. (And about four times as easy as what Tour d’ France riders use — but they don’t have all their worldly possessions with them.)

The road out of Cache Creek to 100 Mile House goes over a series of rolling hills. We traveled up those hills at about 8 miles per hour, and down them at 20. If you do the arithmetic, that works out to about 11 mph. Quite a bit slower than the 16 mph we maintained on a level road. In other words, rolling hills make for a long day.

Some people become dejected on rides like that. I didn’t think about the arithmetic, but just enjoyed my surroundings as I ground out the miles to 100 Mile House. The town grew around a stagecoach roadhouse that was 100 miles from Lilooet, a main center of the Fraser River Gold Rush.

A rowdy bunch of locals was already at the campground when we arrived. They seemed harmless, but were still roaring when we turned in at about 10 pm. It takes more than that to keep tired cyclists awake though. They were not up by the time we left in the morning. We didn’t wake them to say goodbye.