During the week of the BC Day long weekend, the daycare is usually closed, and we have to make plans for the full week. The kids had already been pulled out of daycare, but we had booked this trip online back in March when we had no idea what we’d be doing. Historically we’ve headed to the Interior, more in the Kelowna area, but we couldn’t get a campsite where we were hoping to go. We ended up getting a week at Paul Lake, just outside of Kamloops, where neither of us has spent much time.
It was a pretty good campsite, nothing fancy. But it had a nice and warm lake, so very swimmable, and that was pretty important for a week of blistering hot weather. The kids loved floating in their tubes, playing at the beach, and swimming. The lake has a giant rock feature named Gibraltar Rock that is unmissable from the beach, so we jumped in the canoe to explore that area. It’s a good thing that we did because it was the best place in the entire lake to swim. The lake is more of a fishing lake, and so it’s mostly shallow and has lots of weeds growing up from the bottom, so it makes swimming a bit uncomfortable. But right at the base of this rock formation, there’s been enough landslides that it’s wiped out all the weeds, and it is the best place to swim. There’s no beach, but just enough room for us all to get out and walk around on. This made for a nice private area for us to get away from the busy beach area. We made our way over to this area a few times to cool off and swim around comfortably. We even discovered a cool cave at the base of the big rock to explore.
We went for a hike one afternoon to explore the trail up to the peak of Gibraltar Rock, but we met a couple on their way down that gave us a heads up that there were some bears further down the trail. Not knowing the area at all, we diverted back to the campsite and did a nice hike down to the lake, going down the long, steep switchback trail. Just as we reach the bottom, it started spitting a bit, but we didn’t really mind since it was pretty refreshing.
One day we decided that we’d make lunch out on the canoe and try something new—BBQ’ing, in the canoe. So we paddled over to the far side of the lake, found a shady spot and pulled up beside a log and tied ourselves off and made some hotdogs on the canoe. It turns out the centre canoe seat works well as a cooking platform, and it worked out pretty well. The kids were pretty excited that you could BBQ in the canoe, and we were happy we didn’t hurt the canoe doing it.
We mostly stayed at the campsite for the entire week, which is pretty rare for us to sit still in one place for the whole week, but the lake kept calling us back in. We only jumped in the car to go into town to stock up on ice and ice cream for our after-dinner snack, which was a nice relief from the hot days.
Overall our little vacation in Paul Lake turned out pretty good. There was no shortage of goose poo on the beach, so the warnings of ‘swimmer’s itch’ was always in the back of your head, so that wasn’t fantastic. But at least there was a shower at the beach to ward off any of that swimmer’s itch. Colin and Addison were no fans of that super cold shower, though, as Colin took off running down the beach buck-naked screaming after we picked him up and put him in the shower, much to the amusement of the people in the area.
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