Border control
Wow, is it ever different! Okay, not really...well, not until we got further up the road and began riding along Kootenay Lake. Then it was beautiful!
First we stopped in Creston at a Tim Hortons to use their free wifi. Unfortunately, it would not upload my blog post from yesterday. As a consolation, I had a raspberry truffle donut thing. It was delicious! Annette was able to send a text to John. Therefore, she had nothing to eat
Out of Creston we had our longest climb of the day. It wasn't too bad. There was this nice viewpoint looking down to the valley, and across to the Selkirk mountains.
As we continued riding, we started to see signs for Island Farm ice cream--2 km, 1 km, 1/2 km, there!
Of course, by the time we passed all those signs, we had to stop!
Cute little roadside stand.
Hwy 3A was a roller coaster after the long climb. The views were pretty good once we were along the lake.
Kind of a cloudy day, but the sun peeked out off and on.
We stopped for some lunch at Kuskanook Harbour. Sat in this gazebo. We had tortillas with peanutbutter and Nutella. I had closed mine up, but decided to put some thin apple slices in it. I opened it up and said it looked like a butterfly. Annette said it looked like Jesus. I should have taken a picture. Probably could have sold it for millions.
Down the road a ways, we came to the Glass House. What is this, we wondered? We went to take a look and found out you had to buy a ticket to go in the house. Instead of doing the "German Drive By" (Christian, my German friend, was not fond of paying to go into things--we called it the German Drive By), Annette wanted to go in. It cost $10 (Canadian) for each of us. It was totally worth it! The house is made of 600,000 glass bottles that held embalming fluid. The guy that built it was an embalmer. He used 2 to 4 bottles per person (you can do the math to figure out how many people died to make that house). He disliked throwing the glass bottle away, so instead, he started saving them. He also got the other embalmers to send him their used bottles. The bottles are shaped somewhat like a brick with a neck. He left the lids on, and because of that, the insulating properties are better than most houses built today--R36 compared to R6. He started building the house in 1952, and finished it in '53. Him and his wife lived in it for 18 years. It is now lived in, during the winter, by his son and daughter-in-law. Here's some photos.
From the front
The living room.
One of two bedrooms.
Kitchen.
View out the kitchen window.
Around the house there were numerous paths that led to little gazebos, bridges, and other little nooks.
Notice even the walls are bottles.
Taken from up in the turret
The house was built on bedrock so it wouldn't settle. After the house was finished, and they moved in, people kept stopping to ask if they could see inside. So, the guy built a guard house to keep people out. It didn't work. Then he built a ticket booth and started charging people, thinking no one would want to pay. People were happy to pay! It was a worthwhile stop. I'd recommend it to anyone traveling the Selkirk Loop.
From the Glass House we had just 8 more miles to get to Lockhart Provincial Park. Once again we have no shower. We just did bucket baths. We also still don't have any Canadian currency. Even though it doesn't have showers, and it has vault toilets, I t costs $23 (Canadian, of course). They accepted US currency, but without the exchange. So, it cost us a little more.
After dinner we walked down to the lake. It reminded me a little of New Zealand.
Where the creek runs into the lake.
Gazing upon the beauty-ness!
We did 43 miles of rollers today. It was a good day! Tilmann is performing quite well. I've yet to meet a hill I can't get up! Also, this was the halfway day for our tour. Four more to go!
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