Life On The Ranch: Week 4 Summary

Today marks the final day of our first month living at Myra Canyon Ranch. I honestly cannot believe how quickly time is going and that we only have five more months to explore this incredible place!

Week 4 was slightly busier than week 3, but we are definitely living a much slower pace of life than we were back in Vancouver!

Here is all the excitement that happened in our fourth week...

Walks, walks and more walks

We have rapidly realised that in our ranch studio we can go for hours without moving or even talking to each other. Rich especially can spend hours at his desk doing work without taking a break.

Obviously this is not conducive to good mental health or a happy relationship, so we made a concerted effort this week to try and step away from the devices.

We took some beautiful snowy walks around the ranch and later in the week we drove down to the town to take a stroll around Boyce-Gyro Beach Park.

The views of the mountains from the park were amazing, but neither of us had accounted for the crazy wind speeds and freezing water coming off the lake so our "afternoon exercise" lasted just nine minutes!

Best laid plans and all that...

Inadvertently Stalking (and possibly scaring) our New Neighbour

As I mentioned last week, we have a new next-door neighbour who we have yet to meet, and as I mentioned above we are not really living a fast-paced way of life up here.

Those two things combined have led to an accidental monitoring of the neighbours movements. As we walk around the studio and glance out of the window, we find we are saying things like "oh her car is gone again."

We don't know why we started doing this, but even since we've noticed it we can't seem to stop! Cabin fever may be truly setting in at this point.

Also, on Thursday morning we woke up to another incredible sunrise. I rushed out to the balcony in about minus 4 degrees, wearing just a t-shirt and some very short shorts - so short in fact, it appeared that I was only wearing the t-shirt.

I was minding my own business taking in the view and then I look across and see the neighbour fully dressed in a long winter coat and boots. I didn't feel like it was the most appropriate time to introduce myself so I scarpered back inside.

I'm not sure if she noticed me, but she may now think I'm exceptionally rude or an exhibitionist.

Possibly both.

I can't get enough of these views, Myra Canyon Ranch, Kelowna, BC, November 2020

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I'll let the photos do the talking for this one. We went in early and we went in hard.

We decorated. We drank Baileys. We listened to Bublé. We made mulled wine. We watched "The Christmas Chronicles". We even had a fake fire complete with crackling noises.

It was beautiful and lovely and I can't wait to do it virtually every day for the next month.

All roads lead to a Brewery

We absolutely love visiting Craft Breweries and it was one of our favourite things to do back in Vancouver. Since we've moved to Kelowna, we have mostly been drinking on the ranch or spending way too much money at the local wineries.

On Sunday morning, we headed out with only good healthy intentions and took a scenic drive along Okanagan Lake to Bertram Creek Regional Park. We were intending on doing a short comfortable walk around the park and then driving back to the ranch. On arrival, we found the park gates were locked.

We decided to drive back towards the ranch when we stumbled across Lebanon Creek Greenway Regional Park. Not knowing too much about the park, we just decided to take a risk and give it a go.

Cue 45 minutes of near constant uphill hiking and us coughing our guts up. The views over the lake were some of the best we've seen since we got here, but we didn't really enjoy them at the time!

On our way back down the hill, Rich spontaneously decided that we deserved beer so we swung by the Shore Line Brewing Co. for a taster paddle and a portion of yam fries.

Sometimes, these things are just meant to be.

We cooked a "Roast Dinner" without an Oven!

Probably the number one thing we miss about the UK (except friends and family, obviously) is a proper Sunday Roast Dinner.

We've been so fortunate to have so many incredible adventures, but no country we've ever been to has been able to produce a roast worthy of home. Some countries don't even know what it is!

So we've both been craving a decent roast for a while now and on Sunday evening we decided to give it a go ourselves. We have a ridiculously small kitchen, with a portable stovetop and a BBQ outside. Most importantly for a roast, we don't have an oven.

To tackle this problem, we decided to get a pre-cooked chicken and fry up some potatoes to make roasties. I chopped up some carrots and we had Canadian boxed stuffing (definitely not Paxo - kind of like dehydrated croutons that you add water to, but surprisingly nice) and packet mix gravy. It doesn't sound like the roast dinner of champions...

But it was amazing! Obviously nothing will ever beat a proper British home-cooked roast dinner with all the trimmings, but it scratched an itch we've had for a while now and we'll definitely do it again soon.

And that was that for week 4.