This is where our journey began, three times...

Stage One began on April 2nd, 1997, when we crossed the border into the US, at Osoyoos. Why Osoyoos? It's where Lenore's family lives — her parents run Ogilvy Electrics, and her grandparents also live in the town.

Stage Two sort of began on June 9th, when we left Osoyoos again, this time heading west towards Vancouver Island.

But we passed through Osoyoos yet again in late June, and leave, finally, eastwards, on July 2nd.

Osoyoos is on the border with the USA, at the southern end of the Okanagan valley, in the arid interior of B.C. It is the location of Canada's only true desert, a tiny "pocket" desert, a long-lost offshoot of the Sonoran Desert, way down south in Mexico.

Here live burrowing owls and spadefoot toads, in an area drastically reduced by settlement and irrigation for orchards and vineyards, and still threatened by future develpments.

When white people took over the Okanagan, the local first nation, the Osoyoos Tribe, were pushed into a small reserve that included the land that the settlers didn't want, the most arid. The newcomers planted trees and towns and golf courses, while the desert only survived because it was pretty well useless for anything. When uranium was located on the reservation in the 1950s there was an attempt to grab even that land, but that was fortunately unsuccessful.

Ironically, now the First Nation wish to establish a casino and other developments on their land, the desert is suddenly being heralded as being desperately important and worth preserving. It seems to me that the only justifiable move would be to engineer a land swap, but that is of course unthinkable.

So, thanks to the greed of the white people, nothing new in that, the Osoyoos desert is likely to shrink and will no doubt eventually disappear.

There was a time when Osoyoos was promoted as a Spanish-style town...some arches appeared in the local architecture. It is now a pretty standard motel resort, positioned at the waist that pinches Osoyoos lake, as warm as a bathtub in summer. Summers are very hot in Osoyos! It is surrounded by lumpy sage-brush and Ponderosa Pine-dotted hills, the haunt of rattlesnakes and Black Widow spiders. It can be a beautiful place, away from Motel Row. It can be brilliantly sunny, both in summer and winter.

It is a typical small town, obsessed with small-town matters and small-town politics. People leave to get educated. A few young people return. A proportion never leave. People arrive to retire, although some elderly folk still flee the winters to become "Snowbirds" in Florida and Palm Springs.

I am very fond of Osoyoos. I lived there for a year, and couldn't live there again — I am a city person — but I enjoy visiting very much.

There was once a railway line running south from Oliver to Osoyoos built to carry fruit. Opened 1948, it was never really successful, and closed again in 1970. Now the fruit storage sheds that used to mark its terminus in Osoyoos have been demolished, opening up a view that hasn't been seen for over 50 years. For a while anyway, until it is obscured by the next development...

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