Our Back Story

I fell in love with the Okanagan area when I moved to Penticton, BC, as an 11-year-old back in 1967 after the famliy house in Manitoba (midwest Canada) burned down. When I was 28, having moved to Seattle via Alaska, I bought 40 gorgeous acres east of Tonasket, WA, in the American Okanogan (note the difference in spelling) and built a small cabin on weekends over many years. When it burned down 20 years later in the big forest fires of 2015, I bought a string of tiny Depression-era cottages in the town of Okanogan with the insurance money. (My son Djaerik, who'd always loved the drier eastern half of the State and was being priced out of Seattle, also moved into a house a few blocks away at that time.) After many trips over 2 years, Kokanee Cottages were set up as our new vacation digs and part-time Airbnb rentals, and we could focus on exploring and enjoying the area. I can't believe I literally drove past so much for so many decades! 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, future hubby Greg was living in the Okanogan area for part of the time I was nipping over to my cabin. Originally from Seattle, he graduated from the University of New Mexico and got a job with the mental health group in Omak, Washington (four miles north of the town of Okanogan). He commuted from the even smaller town of Conconully (big fishing destination!) where he fixed up an old farmhouse and started on his eventual career shift to general contracting. (Photo is the house decades later, and it has been renovated yet again.) His younger daughter Sara was born in Tonasket (the town closest to my now pile-of-ashes cabin). Greg later moved his family to Orcas Island in the San Juans. We found out about our Okanogan connection after his divorce, when he started commuting down to Seatttle for Argentine Tango classes just as I was also getting into tango. Shacked up in 1996, married in 2008, still together, knock wood.