Almost a week in, and it’s going great, there are ups and downs, but it’s mainly up so far. We have found everybody to be so friendly down here, whenever we go to farms to ask for work, even if they have no work, they forward us on to other farms, after a good long chat about life.

We did a bit of shopping in Kelowna the other day, so now Malcolm and I have queen size inflatable matresses, which makes a world of difference to a nights sleep. He also picked up a tent, giant six man that could double up as a garage for our car it’s so big! So now we use his other tent as a kitchen/pantry.

We stayed over Kelowna, taking the golf over a very bumpy road by a super rich part of town, but found a great place to camp overlooking the city, valley and lakes. And so we continue to live out in the kind of wild, out of cizilization. Now we are on a hill over looking Osoyoos. You could be forgiven for believing that we we by the Mediterranean here, it’s so beautiful, and mostly warm. This is supposed to be the hottest place in Canada, with record temperatures close to 50degrees!

Where we are camping is a hillside where fruit pickers are known to camp, we’ve picked a spot with a handful of English speakers, whereas across from us is an area with well over 150 French speakers. Apparently last year a forest fire started out from the camp across from us. The camp had been set up by the town to accommodate the pickers, but ended up costing the town around $100,000 to clean up an put out the fire. The french speakers have received the blame, resulting in quite a bit of racism toward the french canadians. However nobody gets any trouble up here. The only problem up here is the lack of running water, electricity and showers. But it’s a great life living away from everything, with such great views.

Yesterday we had a days work, piece work, a lovely had advertised in the job centre. So it was to be $40 for a line of peach and nectarine trees to be thinned. This should have taken one person 4 hours per line. Yet with her aiding the three of us it took almost four hours per line. So after being paid $140 for over ten hours work, we have worked our poorest days work. Thus we ended our working relationship as below $4 per hour is not worth it. We should spend our time looking for better work.
However we had a great day bonding. Nat and I have only known each other a couple of weeks and all three of us have much to learn from each other. We had great discussions about travelling, sex, food, cooking, friends, picking-up and life in general. I think that we are going to have a great time together this summer.
I’m going to get back into speaking French, as Nat can speak French French since she spent a couple of years in Meribel, which is great, and we can both teach Malcolm some French.

Each night we have a campfire, in a well built firepit surrounded by rocks, which we’ve cooked baked potatos, rice, falafal, quinoa, stuffed tomatos, eggs, toast and more on. It’s great, living out here, rent free is wonderful. It doesn’t hurt being so close to USA that we can see the border as supermarket prices are really low. It’s a shame my passport os en route from Banff, so we can’t go and see the states right now.

So it rained heavily last night, and my tent now has a couple of puddles inside, a $30 tent is expected to leak I guess but can I be expected to keep this tent if I am to live in it for four months? Maybe the rain is a freak thing. This is the wettest year ever around here, so maybe it’ll get back to normal and dry up, or maybe not. I also forgot to mention that I have bought a skateboard.

The day before leaving Banff, I emptied out my coin tin to count up $212 so with Malcolm being a great skater, it makes sense that if I’m not snowboarding, I can still be working on my riding in summer, so I have started learning to skate. Better late than never, how many people start skating at my age? Not many I think. I’ve had three days trying and it’s going well, so far I’m just working on my balance, but this should work great as training for winters, as well as keeping me active and fit! Bring on the grazed elbows.

Enjoy some photos (why exactly the upload has turned these upside down i have no clue, but i have things to do in town, so it will have to stay like that for now), and (no idea why they are so small, so something else to work on for next time!):