Sharon and I are having a picnic lunch on the beach in Okanagan Falls. The only breakfast places were these greasy spoon biker hangouts so we picked up some stuff from the new IGA and found a nice spot in the park on the shore of Skaha Lake. Today we’re going to go down to Osoyoos and then back to Vancouver on the Hope-Princeton with a stop in Manning Park to check it out.

We had a great visit with my Mom in Vernon. I’ll post some details and pictures tonight. Yesterday we took the drive down from Vernon to Pentiction with a stop in Kelowna to checkout the waterfront and then on to Summerland where I showed Sharon my old hometown. A lot has changed in Summerland. There’s more development and areas that were once open along Giant’s Head Mountain for us to explore as kids are now small suburbs. We did stop to take photos at some of the orchards and an old abandoned barn on the back road to Penticton.

In Pentiction we found the Tin Whistle Brewing Company and pulled in to check out the brewery and buy some of their local beers. It’s in a small building that houses all the brewing tanks as well as a corner for their retail store, which consists of a rack of t-shirts and a cooler full of their beers. They only sell the large bottles so we grabbed a handful and ran back to the car before the rain got too fierce.

There’s a canal that flows from Skaha Lake through Pentiction and people raft down it in inflatable dingys during the weekends in the summer. Unfortunately there were several dozen people on the canal when the thunderstorm hit and we saw clumps of people on the shore huddled underneath their dingys as the rain poured on them. They looked like wet cats!

Fortunately the storm didn’t hit Okanagan Falls and we found the last space in a campground called the Sun and Sand which sits on the shore of Skaha Lake. And now we’re up, have finished breakfast, and are going to hit the road.