Life On The Ranch: Week 3 Summary

After two incredible, and very busy, weeks living at Myra Canyon Ranch, week 3 seemed pretty dull!

Nonetheless, I am determined to post about our experiences each week, so here is what happened on the ranch in week 3...

Met the Naaayyy-bours*

So we do live on a genuine ranch that stables horses. There are also two dogs, who after three weeks still aren't sure about us. Make of that what you will. Finishing up the menagerie is a chicken coop, including a rooster that doesn't seem to understand what time sunrise is as we tend to hear him around 11am.

On Monday we took a snowy stroll around the ranch and actually said hi to some of the animals that will be our companions for the next five and a half months.

Later in the week the owners of the ranch emailed us to let us know that we will actually have a human neighbour, Katya, living next door from this week, but that since she has flown in from Toronto, we should probably keep our distance for the next two weeks. What a time to be alive.

*My apologies for the terrible Dad joke.

Had an Insurance Address Adventure

This was a very chore heavy week. Just because we are living an amazing life in the mountains, doesn't mean that we get out of doing very mundane things too.

One of the jobs this week was to update the address on our car insurance. If you're reading this in the UK, you'll be thinking this is a two minute online job. This was not a two minute online job.

In BC, it is government mandated that your base level car insurance coverage is with the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC). After trawling the ICBC website for days and going round and round in circles, we eventually just booked an appointment at their downtown office.

It turns out that this was also incorrect and that we needed to update our details with our broker (who apparently is not ICBC?!?!) directly. Another car journey and a half hour meeting later and it was finally sorted. The only good thing to come out of this fiasco is that our premium has reduced by $50 a month. Hooray!

As an interesting side note for our British friends, when you update the address on your driving licence in BC you don't get a new one. Just a sticker with your new address!

Incidentally, if there are any British Columbian's reading who know a quicker process for this, please let us know!

Tried (and failed) to find 'Paul's Tomb'

According to Tourism Kelowna, the Paul's Tomb trail in Knox Mountain Park is a beautiful hike with very little incline and some extraordinary views of Okanagan Lake. Definitely sounds like our kind of walk.

On our first day in Kelowna, we were defeated by what we thought would be a "short walk" at Knox Mountain Park and we should have known it wasn't going to go well for us again this time when we had to drive around the car park three times just to find a space.

I'm not sure how we went so wrong so quickly, but the trail we ended up on got narrower and steeper until we were basically trembling and decided to call it a day.

Knox Mountain 2 - 0 Kelly and Rich

And finally... Kelly and Rich to the Rescue!

At the end of last week's post, I left you with the teaser that we were involved in a very dramatic mountain rescue. It's fair to say I may have exaggerated this slightly...

Despite people thinking we are "very brave" for living in another country, we are actually huge babies about most things. We were meant to be going grocery shopping, but we were scared of the latest round of snow so instead went for a walk up the hill.

It was deadly silent on our walk with the exception of our wheezing noises. About 5 minutes in we hear an almighty cracking sound. We are at this point absolutely terrified that a tree has fallen and that one might subsequently fall on us! (I was also scared about the possibility of an avalanche, it really is amazing where my brain goes!)

We continued on and a few minutes later we hear a continuous car horn sound. Rich rapidly put it together that someone had crashed and needed our help.

We gathered all of our energy and ran up the hill in the snow, looking utterly pathetic in our usual unprepared state, and as we turned the corner we found a truck on its side in the ditch wedged between several trees.

I was immediately fearing the worst, but when I shouted down to the truck, the gentleman inside assured me that he was perfectly fine and he just needed a knife to cut himself out of his seatbelt.

We called Rolf for a knife and he sent his two sons, who carried out the actual rescue whilst we awkwardly bobbed around and occasionally packed stuff in the boot of their car.

And there you have it. Our very first (and hopefully last!) mountain rescue story!

How anyone walked away from this is beyond me! Kelowna, BC, November 2020

Have you ever had to help in a rescue situation? Tell me all about it in the comments below :)