When I prayed that it will be sunny when we go camping, God delivered...maybe over-delivered. We always seem to time our vacation when there is heat wave. Last year we were biking in Whistler during the crazy heat and this year, we camped for 6 days in Summerland and the heat was crippling. Everyday it was between 38-40 degrees. On some days, the weather forecast say 40 degrees but feels like 42!This is how we survived it and ended up making some pretty sweet memories.
1. Pack everything
You never know what you might need so you better bring it all. The SUPs, the kid bikes, the dirt bike. We sadly had to leave the kid kayak behind. The truck was so packed, the kids had to wear their helmets inside the truck.
2. Set up in the shade
Luckily, the campground at Okanagan Lake North is on the side of a mountain and there are lots of trees so our campsite had partial shade. We arrived around 6:00 pm and the sun had set so it wasn't terrible setting up. We found a good spot for the hammock and the kids were happy swinging away.
3. Lake all day
When the temperature is already 30 degrees at breakfast, you have to get in the lake as soon as possible. I got a lot of time reading with my feet in the water watching the kids play and there was even a rare mermaid spotted 😉
4. Boat life is the sweet life
We spent our life savings and rented a speedboat for the day with our friends. It was 40 degrees that day and we didn’t notice the heat for the 8 hours we were living the sweet boat life.
5. When you can’t boat, you float.
Wish we could have had more boat days but we need to leave some money for the kids to go to college so we spent many days at Sun-Oka beach or Ska-ha on our paddle boards, floated the Penticton channel and mastered the air of beach-chair paddle boarding.
6. Go stargazing and sleep with the fly off the tent.
When it’s still 33 degrees at 10:00 pm there is zero desire to crawl inside a tent where it’s even hotter, you stall. So instead of family bedtime inferno, we laid on our beach chairs and looked at the stars until we couldn’t stay awake any longer. We took the fly off the tent in attempt to make it a tiny bit cooler. That meant that the sun shone bright into our tent at dawn but the kids were still able to sleep in till 8:00am
7. Celebrate birthdays with the gift of air conditioning
8. Ice ice baby.
We realized by Day 1 that we needed lots of ice than we anticipated to keep the things in our cooler moderately cold so that meant we had to go to IGA every day to buy a bag of ice. While this could have been a quick trip, we lingered in the blessed air conditioned grocery store until they told us it was closing time. Dad may have even tried to climb in the freezer with the frozen peas.
9. Stay hydrated.
Our campsite had a boil water advisory and Day 1, we realized how much it sucks to boil water and wait for it cool off to drink it so we found a water refill station in town and filled all our water bottles and jugs with water. It only takes exact change so it also was a great exercise in searching every crevasse in the truck to find all those long lost coins.
10. It’s not summer without Summerland Sweets.
This is a yearly tradition and it did not disappoint. We just had to eat our ice cream twice as fast because it was melting as soon as we had it scooped out of the buckets.
And last but not least … call it quits when your whole family is a hot mess.
We were supposed to camp for 6 nights but on Day 5 we decided another night in a tent wasn’t going to be any more fun than it has been so we left after supper at at friend’s (lovely air conditioned) house and drove home at 8:30pm. We got home just after midnight and it was a glorious sleep back inside our air conditioned house. I don't think I want to camp during an intense heat wave like that again but we made the best of it and made some scorching hot memories...
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