After our adventure in the clouds and rainforest of Mount Revelstoke National Park, we drove to Salmon Arm for that evening’s accommodation.

Salmon Arm is a small ‘city’ on the shores of the Shuswap Lake. The lake and surrounding rivers are known for the annual migration of spawning salmon every October. The prevalence of salmon here is where the name Salmon Arm originates, given that once it was possible to spear fish straight from the lake. The dead fish that came from the annual migration also made for excellent fertiliser on the surrounding fields!

Our accommodation was a B&B just a little outside Salmon Arm and on the edge of a golf course, hence its name of The Inn at the Ninth Hole (hyperlinked to save my nosey dad the inevitable effort of Googling it). Run by a Dutch family (the mountains must come as a big shock!) the accommodation was pricey, but also very luxurious compared to what we had been used to up to that point.

The hotel the previous night in Revelstoke had been a strange mix. The bathroom was very decent sized, yet the room itself was possibly the smallest hotel room ever, but what useful space that was left (other than the double bed) was taken up by a table and chairs. Potentially useful for our supermarket takeaway, but not when we couldn’t actually get to it because it was covered in tea and coffee related paraphernalia.

Now those who know Emma and me will know that we are ideally matched, as neither of us drink tea or coffee, or see much point in doing so. So it is particularly annoying when your hotel table is taken up by a coffee machine and free coffee (where are the free cookies!?), and your B&B in Salmon Arm then proudly takes you downstairs to the breakfast area to show off their diverse tea collection that is available 24 hours a day.

Tea and coffee rant over. None of you will understand anyway, as you’ll all be tea and coffee drinkers no doubt.

Despite ‘teagate’, we were very impressed by our accommodation in Salmon Arm. It was spacious, very comfortable and well furnished and maintained. Their food is all locally sourced (off that salmon fertilised land!) and included freshly pressed apple juice – not a particularly appetising brown colour, but far tastier than normal apple juice! They also recycle all the old soap bars and other toiletries by sending them off to developing countries for use there. The wastage of soap bars (having been used a few times in a one or two night stay at hotels), is a particular bugbear of mine (even more so than the tea and coffee thing).

Anyway, the main point behind this blog post was to talk about that evening’s storm, which we felt deserved a mention, but didn’t really fit into other post topics. We had headed down to ‘downtown’ Salmon Arm to pick up some food. Our host had recommended visiting the pier on Shuswap Lake for views over the lake and because we might also spot some otters.

By the time we got there, it was dark, but a huge storm was raging in the distance on the other side of the lake. This included some massive lightning strikes, which we tried desperately to capture on camera – surely no other photo can ever match getting a shot of a lightning bolt?

Unfortunately by the time we got to the end of the pier, the lightning had stopped. Not knowing that it had stopped for the time being, I set up my camera in burst mode, hoping that on one of those many photos I’d capture the split-second lighting bolt.

This didn’t work, and only resulted in hundreds of photos of darkness! So we headed along the pier back to the car as the heavens started to open, but then the damned lightning started up again. Despite some valiant efforts to take a photo of it from the shelter of the car, it was too no avail as it hid itself out of view from where we were parked.

So, after all that excitement, we popped in to Safeway in Salmon Arm – Morrison’s haven’t got their hands on the Safeways here! We picked up some flings (like chicken wings, but not wings, just ‘white meat’, so in effect a nugget – why not call it a nugget then?) and some potato wedges. There were too many wedges though, and this disappointingly resulted in a carbohydrate and potato heavy lunch the following day, as we also had some disgusting potato salad to finish up. We still had the Screme Eggs though at this point, so it wasn’t all bad!

That’s it for now – and to think this was meant to be a short post about a storm…

Stewart