road trip – day nine (winthrop to penticton)

we spent much of the morning at the cabin in winthrop, so got a late start on the drive to British Columbia. the drive was very pretty– we passed through many small towns and wondered what the people that live there do for a living. a lot of the houses had grass growing on the roof for insulation.

we passed through a town called Omak which seemed to have every single fast food chain known to man. the sight of all of them together made me feel somewhat ill.

we finally got to the canadian border where we waited about 20 min to get through customs. there definitely wasn’t a lot of traffic that day. btw, never wear sunglasses while you’re talking to a border guard.

our first stop once we crossed into B.C. was Osoyoos. We went slightly out of the way to get this panorama shot:

Here’s a sign that shows some of the wineries in the Okanagan Valley:

We had a late lunch and wine tasting at the Burrowing Owl Winery in Oliver, B.C. Lunch was fantastic, as was the wine.

This photo was taken at lunch:

By this time it was late in the afternoon, and we had yet to get a place to stay. We ended up driving to Penticton which is on the southern tip of Lake Okanagan and north of Skaha Lake.

Here’s Skaha Lake– there were a lot of people out doing water sports:

Dinner that night was at a Greek restaurant in Penticton called Theo’s Restaurant. Their website is http://www.eatsquid.com . 🙂

We stayed at the Penticton Lakeside Resort that night. It was a nice hotel, but not so great to stay in if you have dogs because we had to get a room on the “dog floor” which had a view of the hotel roof. Sigh. The grounds were nice, though, complete with a huge expanse of lawn as well as a fenced-in dog park on the beach.

The town of Oliver has the largest concentration of wineries in the Okanagan Valley, so if I were to do this trip over again we would have stayed in Oliver that night. We had planned to return the following day but didn’t have enough time to do it.