Kelowna to Panorama and more

We have arrived!

Our night of ten pin bowling in Kelowna turned out to actually be FIVE pin bowling. Quite a different experience indeed. The concept is much the same, however, the bowling balls are about the size of softballs which you basically just throw down the lane. It was a lot more difficult than expected, although we got the hang of it eventfully (but I still came last in my team...ah well).
Next morning we were up at the crack of dawn, well it felt like that since the sun doesn't get up properly until about 9am, to start the final leg of our bus tour. It was a good day, our first stop was a look out point over Coldstream Valley - very beautiful - later we played with some calves (although I don't really know why we stopped there...) and visited the end point of Canada's first ocean to ocean train track. The rest of our bus ride was fairly uneventful, mainly spent on the bus watching movies and taking advantage of the free wifi. However, we did drive through the Rockies and have a picnic in the snow which was fairly interesting.

We arrived at Panorama in the dark, but very excited. Courtney, Dean and myself all live together in the lower village in a place called Horsetheif, so we were given a lift up to our "condominium" by one of the resort staff. Two of our flatmates were already settled in, two boys from Sydney - Madison and Jacob - so we had a little time hanging out with them before heading to bed. Unfortunately our bedding was not supplied for us, so we got to spend the night sleeping on a bare mattress, using couch cushions as pillows and jackets as blankets. Luckily, Canada is big on central heating so we were still fairly warm. The best thing, though, was being able to unpack! Finally!! I've never been so happy to unpack, living out of a bag is definitely not something I am good at.
Waking up to a silent, snow covered village was magical. But extremely disorientating. Thankfully, one of the staff was kind enough to give us a ride up to the staff shuttle when we desperately asked for directions. The shuttle took us down into the town, Invermere, where we spent several hours buying everything we needed. Carrying about ten plastic bags of bedding and food turned out to be much more difficult than we initially thought. Two of my bags had the audacity to break as we were struggling down the hill upon returning to the resort. Even with the help of a couple of friends I still managed to lose feeling in most of my fingers, and the tip of one of then is still tingling (but no frostbite to speak of!).
That night, after a well deserved rest, we checked out the resort nightlife. As the pub situated under our building is not yet open, we headed off to the T Bar in the upper village to see what the situation was. The bar is fantastic. The staff are lovely, checking on you every 10 minutes or so and just being generally great. A lot of the other staff were in the bar so it was nice and rowdy, especially when what seemed like half of Melbourne turned up and started playing pool. The great thing about a place like this though, is that almost everyone is a traveller so they are all keen to meet new people and have a good time together. So, a good night was had by all.

Nothing of great note happened today, so I won't bother boring you with that. But tomorrow is the big staff "Disorientation Party" up at the T Bar with a live band, so good things are still to come for us.

Right. I'll just leave you with that.

Thanks for reading!