Texas Gypsies: Osoyoos, BC

Saturday & Sunday, August 26 & 27, 2017

This morning we woke up to a beautiful morning in Vernon.

Had to have one more picture of our beautiful backyard.
Off we go to Osoyoos about 2.5 hours down the road.

We drove down Hwy 97 through Oliver to Osoyoos. We enjoy these fun maps.

We arrived at the First Nations RV Resort we are staying at. The name is pronounced in-ka-meep.

This metal art was at the intersection of our turn to go to the RV park.

After driving through many low hanging willow tree limbs here is our home for the next 2 nights. The temps are supposed to be in the high 80's so we are glad to be in the shade. The sites here are pretty tight. We happen to have an extra wide site because of the path next to us leading to another parking area.

This narrow path is our access to the lake. You can see how close the rv sites are to the public path.

This is our little section of beach/lake access on this huge lake. You will see a picture of the whole lake later.

In town we parked near a small city park that had this unique fountain.

This bridge had a sign posted saying "no jumping from the bridge". We saw lots of people jumping. Here just one example.

Dusty took this sunset picture on our first night. There were not any clouds, so I was trying to get the sun reflecting on the water just before it went behind the mountain. Best picture I got. Notice there are still lots of people in the water. The temperature is still in the 80's.

The next morning we drove up to a mountain viewpoint.

This is a little over half of Osoyoos Lake. There is a bridge that goes across the middle and more of the town of Osoyoos on the other side. We are parked on the upper part of the lake on what would be the lower part in this picture. Below is the other half of Osoyoos Lake. See how huge it is?

This area of BC is wine country. Here are just a very small vineyard we saw from the overlook.

We drove up a little further and found this 2nd overlook point. Below is one of the many hairpin turns we drove on the way up the mountain.

We are now looking at an apple orchard. We have never seen apple trees kept so thin and close together as these. Look how loaded with apples each tree is.

Just for fun we wanted to show this stop sign in both english and the native First Nations language.

Our next adventure was to the NK'Mip Desert Cultural Center.

We learned that this area is actually the top most portion of the Sonora Desert. Interesting! It is desert like here.

Large groups of these berries were in the trees around the cultural center. Not sure what they are. The people working inside were not the usual crew (today is Sunday) so they didn't know.

There was a lot of concrete and metal art demonstrating the native culture in the outdoor displays.

There was an osprey nest just behind the cultural center. Tic got these great pictures of the osprey.

Inside there was a presentation on the 7 native snakes in this area.

This is a gopher snake. The other 6 snakes local here are the northern pacific rattlesnake, night snake, rubber boa snake, western yellow-bellied racer, common garter snake, and the terrestrial garter snake. Below was their rattlesnake.

The snake presentation was over about 12:30pm so we decided to have lunch at the NK'Mip Cellar Restaurant.

There were a limited number of tables sitting outside on the hillside overlooking part of the vineyards and the Osoyoos Lake. In the shade it was comfortable. We had a delicious and relaxing lunch.

We headed back to the cultural center for a presentation on some native dances and songs. Two young inexperienced people sang the Nk'Mip "National Anthem" to which we all stood.