Excitingly overwhelmed

Again the landscape has changed, and again thoughts of the end of this magical bicycle journey are coming into my mind. We will be arriving in Vancouver in 5 days, and spending our last five days there together as a group preforming in the city and staying at UBC farms.

We have continued to cycle out of the hot Okanagon Valley, and have now ended up in the lush Fraser Valley. On my Convocation day, I cycled 65km from Summerland to Keremeos, and had a hot beautiful ride, thinking all day of my classmates back home, walking accross that stage. I cycled across my own stage as I rode into another hot fruit valley of BC. We did a preformance in Keremeos the next morning, and then it was my turn for a day in the hybrid support vehicle. Catherine and I took our time, got some vegetables donated that were about to be thrown away, and we visited a quirky old mining community called Hedley along our way into Princeton. The next day proved to be a toughy. After preforming in Princeton, we journeyed up and over our last mountain pass of our journey, and down into the moist, lush, beautifully stunning Manning Provincial Park. Here we stayed for two nights and preformed to the camper crowd in between isolated thunder storms - it was funny to have so much rain, as we had not seen any in a looong while! It was also quite great to see mule deer at dusk, and a black bear at the side of the road as we were cycling! It was so close to the side of the road, we were lucky to have been warned by drivers going in the opposite direction of it's presence. After looking on for a few moments, we continued our journey to our present location in Hope, British Columbia. What a name for a town indeed. One of the slogans for Otesha is "Riding on Hope" so it is fun to be in this quaint town for two nights.

And so our group began to speak today about our post - Otesha plans, blues, hopes and fears, and it is strange to think about the conclusion of this journey, but certainly exciting as well, as I plan out my weeks on the coast, and solidify plans for travel with Krista in SE Asia (WOOOT). I am fully enjoying the experience of living sustainably in this wonderful community of people, and I hope to find a similar lifestyle back in Ontario. For now though, it's time to eat some sweet potato fries, and climb to the top of Mount Hope (Can anybody tell me the difference between sweet potatoes and yams? A few of us discuss it alllllll the time in the group, so much so that it spontaneously turned into a full length guitar accompanied song, which I am sure to enlighten you all with my voice some day).

Tomorrow I will keep on ridin' on hope all the way to Yarrow to stay in an Eco-village. Thinking of you all.