Spring in the Okanagan - and fun with the new RV

May 5 we take a trip over the Rockies, (also the Purcells, the Selkirks,) to Vernon to stay with Les and Sandy on and off for a week. The weather is lousy, the blossoms are late and mostly not out yet, a disappointment. However, it's a chance to test out the new Free Spirit RV. We get about 30 mpg on the trip, great with the Mercedes diesel engine. It runs smoothly and happily and has a lot of power to pull past trucks and up mountains. It's also a very comfortable vehicle and Tikal has found it likes traveling with us again. We attach the travel cage to a storage box behind the driver/passenger seats in the hall and it can look out of the window too! Ah to be on the road again.
We spend two nights in Vernon then off to the dealership to remind us of all the stuff we forgot since last Fall when we picked up the vehicle. We need some bits and pieces so shopping we go to Canadian tire in Kelowna, and buy food. By the time we camp on the lake at West Lake in Kelowna, finally get the gas stove going (some flukey on/off method with the gas) and cook dinner, I'm totally pooped. I put the bed together by 9pm and collapse into the huge King size bed that takes up the whole back end of the vehicle. Ted decides he's tired too and we sleep for 10 hours straight! It's lovely and quiet here, just the birds and ducks on the water and a bunch of seniors having a get together - they must have gone to bed early too.
Everyone wants to come by and look at our vehicle. I guess they are fairly new and with the great gas mileage, people with gigantic trailers and motor homes are salivating about how little it takes to get this thing rolling. Of course, we don't want to carry water or waste water far and look for a full hookup with power to run my microwave of course!
Everything in he RV seems to be working OK but as Ted says, the manuals don't exactly show you what's what a lot of the time. We return to the dealership in Kelowna the second day to find out how to get the TV working again!
We will go to a camp-out with a bunch of Leisure Way vehicle owners near Edmonton early next month, where I bet we will learn a thing or two about running this baby!
We're glad we did it that week because, as I write, mud slides have closed the TransCanada highway a few days lately and we may have been stuck he other side or been forced to drive the much longer southern route to get home. More melting snow threatens more avalanches for the foreseeable future.