Wedding Voyage 2011 — Lussier & White River (East Fork)

Fri­day brought us another beau­ti­ful day and more hot springs!  After the tra­di­tional pan­cakes with blue­ber­ries (and a bit of scram­bled eggs on the side), we drove from Goat River to Cran­brook where we restocked some sup­plies (Tim Hor­tons cof­fee, bbq lighter, s’more fixin’s).

We drove up through Kim­berly and Inver­mere, before wind­ing our way up to Lussier hot springs.

The hot springs were PACKED:  A cou­ple fam­i­lies with small kids, a big group of rowdy drink­ing teenage boys, and a few qui­eter older cou­ples.  With the river run-off still so high, only one pool was acces­si­ble, and it was ‘warm’ at best.  Every­one was crowd­ing into the one avail­able pool, but for­tu­nately we were able to find a small nook, a bathtub-sized sec­tion, just meant for the two of us, where we hud­dled in and soaked up the min­er­als.  My sil­ver rings turned this weird reddish-brown colour (which hadn’t hap­pened in any of the other springs we’ve vis­ited recently).  I intended to get some pho­tos of the effect, but they buffed back up to sil­ver before I remem­bered to do so.

Once we’d had enough of the splash­ing, shriek­ing kids, and the loud obnox­ious drunk boys, we headed back up to the van, and drove fur­ther up White Swan forestry road to find another Camp Free BC camp site some 50 Km from the highway.

We found a really beau­ti­ful spot right next to the river.  There were some older cou­ples camp­ing just down the way from us, and when we pulled in, one of them and all 3 of their dogs came over to wel­come us and ask where we’d been, and where we were headed.  We chit-chatted a bit, but when he heard we were just mar­ried, he left us alone – but not before crack­ing jokes about if the van’s a-rockin, he won’t come a-knockin.  Haha.

We noticed it was get­ting cold, and thought it must be a chill off the water, so we started to bun­dle up.  The wind picked up more and more – before long, it was incred­i­bly windy!  Cook­ing and keep­ing things from fly­ing away was a huge chal­lenge.  We decided to make an early night of it and hid in the van, play­ing crib and drink­ing warmed red wine (a trick we learned from that Swiss cou­ple we met in Golden a few months back).

Sat­ur­day morn­ing we hit Radium Hot Springs, and then were on the road back home.  We thought about also stop­ping at Banff Hot Springs, but by the time we were 1.5 hours from home, we decided we would rather just get back home to our cats, get some laun­dry on, start the tran­si­tion back to real life.

By now, we’ve been home for almost a week – and the transition’s been a lit­tle rough.  Our fun lit­tle adven­tures are always tough to leave behind.  Plus, Brian is hav­ing some asthma/allergy issues (likely due to all the hay in town for Stam­pede).  We’re back to work (though allowed to wear jeans all week, thanks to Stam­pede!), and we’re now focus­ing our sites on future adventures!

On the large scale, we are plan­ning a Hon­ey­moon 2.0 for next year – we’re cur­rently think­ing The Mediter­ranean in the spring.  On a smaller scale, we’re only halfway through the sum­mer and are sure to have many more Ziggy adven­tures in the next cou­ple of months.