Skimikin Lake → Canoe → Enderby
Today was a tough day. The smoke was very, very thick. I packed up early and was out of there a bit after 9am. Going down the hill from Turtle Valley was a rush, it was a sealed road and i just zoomed down after breakfast. Then i made a wrong turn and ended up on the Trans Canada Highway
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Back in the 80s and early 90s, Salmon Arm was just a small town, with not much going on. In the mid 80s my mom and I drove from Vancouver to Regina to visit her parents, and on the way home, I remember she was exhausted and so we pulled off the highway in Salmon Arm around 3pm.
There was a Best Western - we checked in and she crawled into bed, giving me some money to go across the street to the restaurant and get some food - I was like...9? and I felt like such a Big Girl ordering food at a restaurant all by myself. I ordered a plate of french fries, LOL.
Afterwards, I saw that there was a waterslide park across the parking lot, and walked over - they were open late because it was July and had a discounted rate if you came in after 4pm - so I went back to the hotel and woke my mom up asking her if I could go to the waterslides.
I'm not sure if she was actually awake or not, but she made a positive sounding noise - so I put on my bathing suit and went to the waterslides - I had never been to waterslides before, and I had the BEST time.
When I got back to the motel room, my mom was awake and hungry - we went back to the restaurant, had dinner, and then checked out and got back on the road - we were only about 4 hours from home at that point.
The other memory I have is of Canoe. Canoe is such a podunk little nowhere town - I don't remember *how* we found it - but one summer my dad, who was big into the amateur radio thing, "met" some friends on the radio who lived around there, so on the way home from some camping trip, we made a detour into Canoe.
I remember parking in this gravel parking lot that had oil on the gravel to keep the dust down, and walking through a culvert "tunnel" with a train track overhead, to get to this magical beach with a lake. The water was warm and my brothers and I played in the lake all afternoon - it was cloudy but warm, and there was this HUGE mountain on the other side of the lake. My mom sat on the beach and relaxed and my dad went off to meet up with his friends.
Years and years later, when I went home to visit in the summer, I was determined to *find* that beach again - so my brother and I took my rental car and drove out to Canoe. We drove around and we DID find the lake!
The water was a lot colder than I remembered - but I swam in the lake again and relived my childhood! So I'm kind of excited that you found Canoe beach!
It's kind of depressing that there was so much smoke you couldn't even seen across the dang lake though!
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The good news is that despite the smoke there were still kids paddling and playing in the water. Even down here in Enderby with the apocalyptic orange skies there were people tubing down the river. It's reassuring, i think, that kids will find an adventure to have, no matter what's going on around them.
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