Osoyoos, Canada - Polarsteps

We got up early and packed up, neither of us having slept enough, and then made our coffee and tea by the river and Kini worked on my crooked bike rim. At a point we figured the best thing to do might be to take it to the bike shop in town, but on the ride back into town Kini saw how much progress they'd already made on it and figured they could keep fixing it up if we settled in a park for a little while. Riding back along the trail, we saw another tent set up off the trail with a bike next to it; we weren't the only ones trying to figure out how to sleep in Osoyoos last night. We ran a few errands in town-- Kini sent a box down the road with their license plate collection and a bunch of cold-weather gear, and I added the down parka I've been carrying (it's been great to have during cold off-the-bike times, but I can't imagine needing it again any time soon). We set up at a picnic table in a lakefront park and Kini worked tirelessly on my wheel (some ducks, pictured, hung out right next to us for most of our time there). Hours in and worried about the spoke tension that they couldn't measure without the proper tools, they walked the wheel a few blocks up the road to the bike shop, which it turned out was so swamped that they wouldn't have been able to look at it for a few days, and also mentioned that they don't use tension metres and just true wheels "by feel"-- Kini was warned at bike school to be wary of shops that operate this way, and was out of there pretty quickly. Kini ultimately got my wheel back into shape; by mid-afternoon, though, we'd missed our window to comfortably get over the mountain and were stuck with the problem of where to stay in Osoyoos again; riding the same 10km out of our way again and then back the next morning was something we really didn't want to do. We called the campground with $50/night sites and found out that, while they had a spot for us, it was intensely crowded there and that they had hundreds of sites full and only three left. We debated paying way too much for a loud night at a party campground, and decided in the end that if we had to splurge on a night, especially when we were already tired and underslept, it should at least involve a bed, four walls, and a shower. We booked a little room at the cheapest 1-star motel in town, the Spanish Fiesta Resort, and got a pizza and a solid night's sleep. -Sara