A few days after I got back from my US trip in June I got a phone call from my grandparents. They were planning to drive out to Kelowna, British Columbia to visit family with my great-aunt and wanted to know if I would come, and do some of the driving. My grandmother doesn’t drive in the mountains, and my great-aunt doesn’t drive at all. It didn’t seem fair to have my grandfather do all the driving on this trip. I love road trips. I love driving. I had done some crazy long road trips before… so driving for 6 hours a day didn’t seem that bad. I didn’t have a job, aside from some freelance writing to come back to, so I had time for a trip. Also I wanted to spend some time with my family.
The majority of my trip to Kelowna was going to visit family, but one afternoon I got to do some exploring on my own. I’d been to Kelowna once before, on a family road trip when I was 8. We just stopped for a night. This time I wandered down toward lake Okanagan, which stretches 135km long from Vernon in the north down to Penticton in the south. Lake Okanagan reportedly has a sea monster living in it, which the First Nations People called Naitaka. It eventually became known as the Ogopogo.
The Ogopogo in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Okay so I didn’t come face to face with an actual sea monster, just this statue. Funny enough though as soon as I saw this statue a bunch of memories from my first Kelowna trip came back to me. Sure enough I could remember sitting on this same statue with my little brother while our parents snapped our photos. That was over 20 years ago, and the Ogopogo was just as elusive this time as it was the last.
That deja vu feeling is interesting and also what memories are triggered from photos. Nice of you to help out the grandparents too.
It’s fun to revisit places you went as a child, isn’t it? Especially when you have a photo of yourself in a certain spot and that spot is still there. Makes you wonder how many hundreds, or millions of people have taken the same picture, doesn’t it?
My husband and I went to a place in Michigan that I don’t remember visiting as a child because I was too young. It was weird to walk around and see all these places that I’ve seen in photos but don’t remember. Made me want to take my own kids there and get their pictures taken in the same spots.