CRANBROOK BC ON OUR WAY TO FERNIE

We had a few days to play around after leaving Elk Kamp outing before our next SOTF event would begin in Fernie BC. We did a quick stay-over with our friends Rosalie and Jack in Elk, WA. After enjoying breakfast they had fixed for us, we took off for Cranbrook KOA where we would spend two nights.

The KOA is nothing special but is a mere hour and a half drive to Fernie from there, which meant we could relax a bit and take our time packing up for the drive in two days.

One of our sister friends stayed here as well, and we went to dinner together at the cafe up the hill a bit.

We were happy to have some time with Bonnie and her pet Zoe who we took with us for our dinner al fresco.

The next morning Susan and I would take our bike ride on the Rails to Trails route and as I waited for Susan to finish gearing up, I watched some migrating geese. A little hard to see in the photo unless you can enlarge it.

Susan has her usual stop at the information board to be sure of where we are, where we are going, and how we will come back. 😉 Not much in the way of planning as it is an out and back trail. But she must know the details. (That has come in useful more times than one!)

It is a straightaway trail with a few road crossings here and there, and we had many nice views.

The bridge gave us places to pull off for good views of St. Mary River.

I first tried my best for a photo through the wire fence. Not too bad.

Then saw that the other side of the bridge had these great cut outs for camera bugs. ;’-). So we were able to get decent full photos of that side.

Susan did try again for a photo on the other side, and I am not sure what she ended up with. 🙄.

The trail was not totally flat as there were some nice long freewheeling downhills at the start and halfway points. But — that meant long pulls uphill at the end and start points! This would be a long day for Susan as she is not used to doing more than maybe 25 miles. So we did have a couple of rest stops — in the guise of enjoying more views 😉.

Nice benches along the way gave us good resting options. All were in memory of someone.

So you now know we are looking out at the Wycliffe Flats, and the river that runs through it.

We made it to Kimberly, the end of the trail, where we stopped for lunch. Someone at the campground suggested the Mexican restaurant to Susan. As we were biking along two women who had just come off a mountain bike trail came coasting by us and said yes, that’s a good place and their Burrito Bowls are great. So that is what we had and she was right. They were great.

Time to head back to camp. With a stop or two to “take in more views” or the same views perhaps. It had been a wonderful 40 mile ride and a wonderful lunch and weather could not have been better. Just about a perfect day. Maybe it WAS perfect as neither of us could think of a thing we would change about it.

Next post will be from Fernie.