Skip to content

Travel Adventures

Trip Report: Kelowna and Back, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my trip report from Nelson to Kelowna and back. Part 1 can be found here. 

Grand Forks to Osoyoos

As noted in Part 1, my planning seemed to be right on par, but a thought had kept bugging me while I was eating breakfast. My spreadsheet takes into account elevation gains and losses, but it does not differentiate between whether the hills are near the beginning of a route, in the middle, or near the end.Read More »Trip Report: Kelowna and Back, Part 2

Trip report: Kelowna and Back, Part 1

This is Part 1 of what will likely be a 3 or 4 part series on a recent trip from Nelson to Kelowna and back.  Part 2 can be found here.

Preface

A pure electric vehicles (EV) with the range of my Nissan Leaf, coupled with the lack of infrastructure in our region, really makes a road trip greater than the range of your EV an exercise in patience. If you can afford a Tesla right now, then this road trip would have been comparatively simple, as you could fairly easily drive the regular speed in winter and make it between public chargers with range to spare. However, for most of us, a 6-figure vehicle is simply out of reach, so if you need to regularly do trips outside the range of the EV you are looking at, you may want to consider a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) instead. In a few years, when infrastructure has filled in and there are longer-range EVs for a reasonable price (see the upcoming 2017 Bolt), this trip will become commonplace and little different than driving in a gasoline vehicle.Read More »Trip report: Kelowna and Back, Part 1

Skiing and a Christmas Tree

For a video update on winter driving, go to the bottom… (original post follows)

Ski season started recently in the Kootenays!    I love skiing so this is one of my favourite times of the year.  There are a few ski hills close to Nelson, so in the fall I plugged the data into my spreadsheet model to see which trips were viable:

EV energy usage model by trip

EV energy usage model by trip

Read More »Skiing and a Christmas Tree

Driving up to winter at Kokanee Glacier Park

The weather has been cold and clear in Nelson for the last week now.  From our home, we get a tantalizing view of the mountain peaks covered in snow, and we woke up this morning wanting to get a better view.  We had not been all the way up to Kokanee Glacier Park before, so we looked it up on the provincial parks website.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge – ok maybe the peaks are just barely peaking up above the ridge!

“Hmm, 20 km out to Kokanee Creek park, then 16 km of dirt road up the Kokanee Creek valley from Kootenay Lake, and the parking lot is at 1,570 m!”  It was -3 C at our house, so it would only get colder going up.  Driving slow up a bumpy dirt road with the heat on, and gaining just over 1,000m was going to do a number on the battery.Read More »Driving up to winter at Kokanee Glacier Park