Ten hour work days. Major life decisions. Living in a Camry. Increasing expectations.

This is what I hoped to leave behind as I left Saskatchewan and headed west.

After the success of last year’s Easy Rider Tour 2006 and what was probably the greatest two weeks of my life, I did not hesitate to plan another trip to the Okanagan Wine Country in 2007!

The first two weeks of July seemed perfect: I could straddle the Canada Day long weekend, I was participating in a house boat tour on the Shuswaps the next weekend, and the weekend after that my friends Scott and Gill were coming from Vancouver to tour wineries with me in Kelowna.

The plan for this first day was simply to get to Calgary and stay there for the night. In what some may call ‘typical Ryan fashion’, I left late- by about three hours. And I arrived really late….nearly midnight!

I wanted to get there as quickly as I could so I took secondary highways via Macklin, Castor, and Three Hills to get there. I took a lot of rest stops along the way for two reasons: 1) My legs aren’t used to long trips yet so I needed to stretch out every so often, and 2) it was a beautiful sunny prairie Saturday and I wanted to enjoy some of the landscape.

When I got to Calgary I went to my friends Doug and Jamie Lynn’s place to stay. When I got there I half expected them to be ready for bed…but I was wrong. It turned out that they had Glenfiddich in the pantry. After being on the road in the hot sun for over seven hours I could think of nothing that could hit the spot better.

After a few drinks we thought it was a good idea to go into their new hot tub in the backyard at about 1am. So we did. We sat in there until about 4:30am at which time we decided to go to bed.

…actually the deciding factor was not the time but the fact that the sun was coming up. And I had been drinking a lot of scotch out of a mug…it was not hard to fall asleep that night.