It's sunrise of the Third Millennium and I'm bombing down Highway 97 on an Okanagan odyssey, my Leica in one hand, rental car steering wheel in the other. My art mission– the Valley 2000 project– is to define the true essence of turn-of-the-millennial Okanagia.

It's a beautiful warm grape-day harvest of hitch hiking Quebec fruit pickers, roadside fruit stands and fruit, fruit, fruit, so I blast off ten rolls between Grindrod in the north and nearly

out-of-bounds Keromeos in the south, photographing shopping malls, housing projects and Indian Land.

I'm an outsider here on the skin of other peoples lives, passing their fallen down relics of pioneer farms and reservation churches, seeing their future from the fast food highway- the promised paradise prosaically clad in vinyl siding, fulfilling the dream of itself.

Henri Robideau's contribution to Valley 2000 ~ a quartet of images ~ The Four Directions of the Okanagan: North, South, East and West.