Travels Home - Okanagan to Manitoba

 A half day drive took us to Sicamous area - Yard Creek Provincial Park. Setting sun's rays on the forest floor.

 Still lots of snow in the rockies near Rogers Pass.

 Lunch break at Field B.C.

 Out of the mountains and heading into the prairies. Night stop in Carstairs AB.

 Crossing a valley north of Drumheller.

 A free nights camping at the rustic Delisle, SK community park.

A beautiful sunset at Yorkton, SK.

Arrived home Monday afternoon. Thanks for following our travels and volunteering. This ends our blogging for now.

Final Week Volunteering at the Gleaners

 Looking out our rear window at 6 a.m. and seeing the cherry orchard being sprayed. Some of that spray lands on us also.

A farmer in the flooded city of Grand Forks, BC donated three truck loads of what the market considers undersized potatoes to the gleaners. His comment was that, "he would rather feed people than livestock". Each bag holds a thousand pounds.

These great white potatoes only needed some sprouts and spots removed.

Meeting and visiting with new people as you work is great.

Annette getting to know Mia, who was a former YWAM participant from Madagascar.

Greg, our Gleaners manager loading the new dehydrator named "Ruth".
Twenty one racks with over 20 trays each fill the dryer.

In the past the Gleaners could depend on processing frozen product to help us fill in during limited fresh produce, but since Sobeys purchase of Safeway/Lucerne this has ended. They are processing the last of their brussel sprouts from the freezer.

Interesting facts in the coffee room.

A beautiful rainbow on our final evening in Oliver. It felt like a sign of blessing for this place.

The Okanagan Fruit is on its Way

 On our first walk around the neighborhood on April 29th, apple and cherry trees were in full blossom.

 Now three weeks later the fruit is set on and growing. Apples above and cherries below.

 Cherries are usually ready for picking in about a month from now.

 These we believe are apricots.

 This may look like Jim is ready for picking fruit, but is actually trying to close holes in the wire mesh to keep birds from building nests in the roof beams.

 Jim had asked about doing maintenance tasks and was assigned the job of putting up used sheet metal for their used lumber pile.

 We have been enjoying numerous outdoor meals.

 On a 30 degree day it made sense to make granola and fruit crisp out doors on the barbecue.

 Doing dishes in our tiny house with minimal counter space.

 We bring along our water filter which gives us consistent tasting water where ever we travel.

 Annette working on our weekly blog post.

 Our current view out our rear window may have extra features like the California Quail which frequents our Gleaners yard.

Evening sun on our back yard mountains. We are now only three RV's out of a possible twelve.

Gleaner Weekly Tasks and our Explorations

You might think at the Gleaners we would only prepare vegetables but today we will show you some of the other jobs that happen weekly.

They have 1000 pans for the dehydrator which get washed 500 at a time. Annette got to be on the team of 4 that washed all those pans this week.

Three other volunteers had the job of washing the teflon sheets that go on the pans before the chopped veggies get spread. Here was another job that Annette helped with drying all those sheets after they have been washed. We had to wipe each teflon sheet with a towel and then put them in the dryer for about 5 minutes. We were working in a tiny laundry room so it felt like a sauna at times.

On Thursday a semi truck arrived to be loaded with the soup mix and they had 2 hours to do this job. Jim volunteered to help load the truck with couple other men. They stacked 1104 boxes of soup mix, with each box weighing anywhere from 35-50 lbs. The boxes were stacked about 7 ft. high in the 40 foot container. This load is headed first to the coast and then to Guatamala. In two weeks they will do another truck load like that.

Jim asked if he could help with some of their maintenance jobs so they gave him a job which he has been working at in his spare time and when it is not raining. He will be covering this structure with used sheet metal to protect their wood pile.

Since we arrived here two weeks ago we have seen how busy all the farmers are in the area. We have taken note of the pepper fields nearby mounded in nice rows with black plastic waiting for the right planting time. Then Saturday we witnessed them do the actual planting. They have a tractor pull a planter with 2 people on it and planting the peppers as the machine passes along the row.

On Saturday we headed to Vaseux Lake Birding Observatory where we enjoyed beautiful sunshine and sighting some birds.

After this we took a nice drive on a curvy road to Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory about 30 minutes from Oliver. After a visit with Annette's cousin last weekend who recommended a visit to this observatory. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory is operated by Canada's National Research Council the country's premier research and technology organization. The hills surrounding Penticton BC's White Lake basin offer protection from man-made radio interference and make this location an ideal site for Canada's only radio astronomy observatory.

Astronomy originated with the study of the night's sky's visible light, a type of electromagnetic radiation. But this light, perceptible to the human eye, only represents a very small part of the universe's radiation. Radio astronomy, the study of naturally-ocurring radio emissions from celestial objects, provides us with an alternative view of the universe that we could not obtain any other way. Radio telescopes - radio antennas used individually or linked together in an array - detect these radio emissions, which have wavelengths about 1 million times longer than visible light.

CHIME - (The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) Chime is their newest and is a very unique instrument which is designed for a special purpose. It maps cosmic signals over the whole sky visible from Canada. The four 100 meter x 20 meter half pipes shown below are the telescope mirrors which focus radio waves onto a line of 1024 receivers. It is sensitive enough that it could detect a cell phone floating in space 20 times as far away as the moon. This is why we were told to turn off our cell phones during our visit.

As we walked from the parking area signage explained about the 640 meter line painted on the road representing the age of the universe. Giving details en-route of when different creation events happened finally coming to the point of man kind on earth. From this point to today was represented by a line 30 cm long. Kind of blows your mind about creation and the Bibles statement that to God one day is like a thousand years. These telescopes are recording events that happened ions ago and these radio waves are only now reaching earth.

Many of you are hearing about the flooding that is happening in the interior of BC. There is major flooding at Grand Forks BC which is 150 kms. away and Osoyoos 20 kms south of us has flooding on the flood plain areas. And locally here in Oliver we see some flooding streams that they are constantly working on by sandbagging to protect the farmland and housing close by. But we can still see snow in the high elevations and the warm temperatures brings about fast melting and it all has to come down.

Service Work for the Young and the Senior

This is our re-introduction to life at  OKG (Okanagan Gleaners) in Oliver, BC. It's been a week of putting names to familiar faces. Before arriving here on site we had stopped at Superstore in Penticton. Here a lady greeted us in a friendly manner leaving us wondering. Did she know us? Had we met before at Gleaners or church? Turns out we met Betty at the Oliver Alliance Church, where we met her again last Sunday. Dave, her husband is involved at the Gleaners where  Jim has been helping him with a variety of maintenance jobs.

We arrived to a full campground on Saturday, which really thinned out by this weekend leaving only three units.

Improvements have been made in the landscaping of their steep banks since the last time we were here.

This week we were blessed with the help of 18 Grade 10 students and four adults from RJC (Rosthern Junior College)  SK. This was their week of applying service to their studies. They tented in the orchard like camping area. A great group of hard working teens.

Monday tasks centered around changing over from soup mixing which had been done the previous two weeks before we arrived, back to processing vegetables. They mixed and packaged soup equivalent to 5.3 million servings and more will be done in June. Mixing is a dusty job so walls and shelves needed dusting, floors swept and washed.

This semi-load of soup mix is ready to be taken to the coast for transport by ship to it's destination.

The refrigerated semi has been storing produce during the mixing process. Even after working with these not so pristeen carrots Annette was still game to make a pot of roasted red pepper and carrot soup. And it was good!

We have enjoyed numerous meals outside. The weather has been great!

After the carrots it was time for parsnips which were also passed the best before date.

Then it was thrilling to work with the first of the new greenhouse grown peppers donated by an Abbotsford grower. Peppers are graded for size, shape (they need 4 bumps on the bottom) all round perfection. Some were huge, others have internal rot which are rejected by their scanner.