Osoyoos’s Melvie Tarr, left, Naramata’s Oliver Tennant, and Oliver’s Alec Rollison and Tim Mah are four of the five buddies heading off for a snowboarding road trip in December. Missing is Oliver’s Lukas Toth. The group of five young men have been planning this trip for more than two years and purchased an RV for the journey. Photo by Laurena Weninger - Click on photo for larger image
OSOYOOS TIMES-December 2, 2009
By Laurena Weninger – Osoyoos Times
“I think a lot of this trip is about postponing taking life seriously.”
Oliver Tennant – his buddies call him Oli – is one of a group of five young, South Okanagan men who have decided to put everything else on hold and go on a snowboarding road trip.
Tennant, 18, grew up in Oliver, but now lives in Naramata.
Melvie Tarr, 18, is from Osoyoos.
Lukas Toth, 18, Alec Rollison, 18, and Tim Mah, 17, are also from Oliver.
The group is hitting the road on Dec. 7 in a 1979 29-foot Class A Citation Motorhome and they’re heading for the hills.
Sometimes, the guys in the group all talk at once, making it hard to determine whose idea is whose.
The plan, however, seems to be borne of them all.
“It was on the Baldy Bus, in Grade 10,” one of the guys volunteered, about where the snowboarders got the idea to take their passion on the road.
The Baldy Bus is a bus that transports people from Oliver up to the local ski hill, Mount Baldy.
Tennant, Toth, Rollinson, and Mah all met in elementary school, but they added Tarr to their group in about Grade 10 – thanks in part to the common interest of snowboarding.
“It was like, ‘Why DON’T we do it?’” said Mah, about how their idea took shape.
Before long, the guys had assembled a binder to keep track of their plans.
They made a wish list of where the trip might take them, and how long it might go on.
“Theoretically it will go until about the middle of May,” said Tennant. “It’s how long you can last.”
This group might last longer than others heading out on a similar undertaking, if only thanks to the planning.
They’ve been crunching the numbers and have saved enough to last them for about five or six months – plus extra cash for a contingency fund.
Gas money, a food budget and money to cover the variable cost of lift-tickets for various ski hills – the guys rattle off the numbers.
They are not new to the idea of a savings plan.
All of them have chipped in equal amounts and in 2008 they paid $6,500 in cash for the motor home.
“That was one helluva day, when we bought the RV,” Tennant said, laughing at the memory.
The group went to Penticton just to look at the unit, but ended up buying the rig on the spot.
“Hey dad, we own an RV,” said Mah, remembering the phone call he made after the purchase.
He thinks that is when their parents started to realize the group was serious.
Each of the members said his parents are supporting their trip, at least in principle.
Some of the parents have added accessories like old silverware or luggage containers to the motor home and some gave cash graduation presents toward the trip.
But for the most part, the teens have been working part-time jobs for years to put away enough money to realize their travel goals.
MEXICO PART OF GROUP’S ROAD TRIP ITINERARY
They have an itinerary, but they hesitate to call it a “plan.”
Instead, it is a set of “ideas,” “dreams” and “possibilities.”
The only deadline is the absolute final return date – just before their six months of vehicle insurance runs out.
“Places we’ve seen in magazines,” said Tarr, explaining how they came up with their wish list of destinations. “Places we’ve heard have good snow.”
“The more people you talk to, the more ideas you get,” Tennant added.
But they have the list of places they would like to go committed to memory and can rattle it off as surely as their own names: “The Rockies. Washington. Oregon. California. Colorado. Idaho. Montana. Utah. New Mexico. Nevada.”
OK, they admit they might not do much snowboarding in Nevada – though there is one hill – but they thought maybe they might like a break from the cold, wet weather. That’s also why their plans include a brief stop in Mexico.
The group is taking cellphones and a laptop to check weather reports.
But they don’t plan on being in touch much at all.
While the boys recognize this is their chance to taste the open road, all of them seem to have a pretty firm grasp on their future.
Tarr is signed up to attend Dalhousie University next September to take mechanical engineering.
Tennant is signed up for the University of Victoria to study social sciences.
Toth is looking at the British Columbia Institute of Technology or Okanagan College and Mah and Rollison haven’t yet made up their minds about what the future holds for them.
Tarr said he has a whiteboard and on it he has been keeping track of the days left before departure.
“It used to say ‘400 days to go,’” he said on Nov. 28. “It’s surreal that it’s now down to barely eight days to go.”
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