Canada: 06-09-25 - Day 2 - All things bright and beautiful….well, not quite!

I imagine you’re all wondering why we posted a photo of a dog wearing a headscarf in yesterday’s blog. Other than ‘why not’ it was part of an advert at Toronto airport which we thought looked quite cute plus the fact that there were three dogs on our flight.  Honestly, you never get any dogs on flights and then three come along all at once! We had a black Labrador service dog and two tiny Winston size dogs and considering it was a five hour flight from Toronto to Kelowna we didn’t hear a bark out of any of them, they were so well behaved.

We had a surprisingly good nights sleep albeit our joints ached after sitting on a plane seat for such a long time. Only one thing for it, yoga stretches and a long walk. Yoga stretches completed we set out on our walk down to the lakeside. The weather forecasted full sun with temperatures between 24-30 degrees however due to drifting smoke from the wildfires on the Coquihalla Highway it cast a halo around the sun and the blue sky was no longer blue. Our walk took us along the banks of Lake Okanagen where we hooked a left and ended up in the Pandosy district of Kelowna and soon found ourselves ‘being seen’ at our favourite coffee shop, the Bean Scene Cafe.

Back home we decided to have yesterdays vegetarian sushi for breakfast which was quite delicious then showered and got ready to head out for lunch to meet up with Maice’s aunty Carole and her daughter Ginger, son-in-law Sean and 16 year only son Blaise at ‘Frankie We Salute You’ vegetarian cafe in the Landmark district of Kelowna. We encountered this place last year and thoroughly enjoyed the food so thats where we all met. The food was amazing and our waitress was from Formby just outside of Southport who had came over for 6 months two years ago and is still here! Ginger was telling us that for the first time ever Canadian Country Music Awards and Country Music Week festival is coming to Kelowna in a few days time and there are numerous free events going on around the town and apparently Sean and Ginger have been invited to the Awards Ceremony, how very exciting. So hey, we can go line dancing or square dancing where we can maybe bust a few of our ‘Texas’ dance moves that we learnt a few months ago 🤣🤣!

We got back home at 3pm and all felt a bit tired/jet lagged so instead of having a siesta we brought out  the board games and played a game or two of Sequence before Maice and I had the idea of going for an early evening dip in the lake. Sea dipping is now our new past time (we don’t swim, we dip) which we intend to do every weekend, spring, summer, autum or winter, come rain, wind or shine, okay maybe not so much the rain but start as you mean to go on and whilst we’re here in Kelowna we aim to go dipping as many times as we possibly can. The temperature of the lake was 24 degrees and it was lovely. Usually the view across the lake is stunning but because of the smoke in the atmosphere the lake took on this strange ethereal look to it, it was all very eerie, the sun we noticed that the smoke was changing the colour of the moon to a reddy orange. At first we thought it was a harvest full moon but apparently it’s the effects of the smoke! For comparison, we’ve added in a photo of the lake from last year just to show you what the view should look like…….

Feeling refreshed we enjoyed a glass or two of prosecco and by 9.30 pm we were so tired all three of us retired to our beds. As always our first day was quite leisurely, recovering from our long travel day although we had been surprisingly active what with our early morning yoga, walk and swim. We’re pleased to have walked at least 13,735 steps and had a splash around in the lake.

On that note here’s a little M&A musing…. ‘Allow yourself 8 - 12 hours of ‘alone’ time every morning to prepare for the day’!