A not terribly successful day

Entry to Cranbrook downtown

Today we thought we'd work our way across to Cranbrook, then take a loop up to Kimberly and Fort Steele. We visited those places once years ago, and enjoyed both places. Kimberly is (or was?) a touristy town, with chalets and architecture reminiscent of Swiss Alps towns. Fort Steele is a recreation of a Mounties post back in gold rush days.

We set off under cloudy skies and dripping rain. That limited our views on this, another great drive otherwise, all along Kootenay Lake. 

This place had an interesting heavy-duty breakwater, with an opening for boat traffic:

We thought it was a wealthy cottager maybe, but further along we could see that it's a private resort area, with cottages and campers, so a shared beach although not public access.

While travelling the lake road it came to me that this was where a house was built from empty bottles, and sure enough we found it <BC bottle house link>:

This fellow was an undertaker back in the day, and he and his cronies emptied a lot of square-shaped embalming fluid bottles.

As we approached Creston, the woods and cloud opened up and we could see some wonderful-looking fields, a real contrast to the tree-covered slopes we'd been seeing, although you can see it was still somewhat misty:

In Creston we parked at the tourist info place for a break (we had driven almost 75 km already ya know), and they had a display of pictures done by local artists, most for sale. 

A sample painting

Cathie got a tour of the basement work room where several artists work at times

 

A lot of the day looked like this, off and on:

We did get to Kimberly, where it was raining heavily at times, not nice weather for a walking tour. We didn't see much that interested us today, so after a lunch break we pressed on to Fort Steele.

Well, the Fort Steele historic recreation was closed today, only open Friday thru Sunday right now. OK, we can camp in the area anyway. A nearby rustic campground didn't have a cell signal for us, and we didn't want an afternoon/evening without our internet. So back to the fancier place right across from the closed Fort Steele exhibit, where we had a good cell signal.

We just wanted a simple site, preferably with electric. Their electric sites all had full hookup services (electric, water, sewer), all for "only" $70 per night, way too much for us. Their non-serviced sites looked like they'd be hard to get level on, and they still wanted $50 for those! So I thanked him and we moved on back to the Cranbrook area. 

By golly, we had missed the fact that Cranbrook has a Walmart. That was looking pretty good by now, 4pm on a darkening rainy afternoon. But no, this Walmart does not allow overnights, even a relatively small rig like ours. 

The Walmart Customer Service rep I talked to lived up to her name though, and told us that the local Home Hardware allowed overnights! It turned out that the Home Hardware lot abuts the Walmart lot, so not far to go.

Home Hardware had a lovely sign we've never seen before, anywhere:

So we're in a Home Hardware lot in Cranbrook for overnight, a first stay for us at any Home Hardware. With the nearby Walmart we have everything here that the $50 no-services site would have had, and more. A good end to a not-so-good day.

Oh yes, we're now back to Mountain Daylight time, just 2 hours behind Ontario.