Okanagan - Day 4

We travelled to Penticton today, which is where we are going to spend most of the next week, before heading home.  The theme for today was "bad service in restaurants".  Not sure what is up with BC, but the majority of the restaurants we have been to have been awful.  For supper yesterday, we went to Boston Pizza, where it was not busy, but it still took forever for our food to arrive, and our waiter never returned to process our payment for the bill.  We ended up taking the bill to the front and paying.  Today, we stopped at a Dairy Queen in Osoyoos for lunch, but they only had two employees working - one on the front till and one on the drive through.  That meant that only one customer could be served at a time.  After waiting at the front of the line for 10 minutes, we left.

Tonight, we planned on going to Taco Bell for my wife.  The story there was identical to the DQ.  Two workers and the front counter worker was responsible for taking the orders, making the food and then calling it out.  I'm not sure how long we waited in line, but it was agonizing.  If it wasn't for the fact that my wife loves Taco Bell, I would have left and gone somewhere else.  Sandra's comment was that at least this restaurant was open - a few years ago, we tried to go to a Taco Bell in Edmonton, but it was closed during the afternoon due a shortage of employees.

Enough complaining about food.  Now it's time to complain about roads!  The first part of our day involved travelling to Penticton.  This is the first time I have ever driven down this highway and I found the road down into the Okanagan valley unbelievably insane.  It is extremely steep, with numerous switchbacks, as you essentially drop down the side of a mountain.  I'm starting to miss the flat roads back home.

Once in Penticton, we found our motel room, which is right across the street from the beach.  After a bit of a rest, we took the kids to the beach and spent the afternoon playing in the sand and the water.  Despite being really hot again today, it was quite cool at the beach.  There were trees for shade and the water is really cool.  I even spent sometime swimming, while the kids filled buckets with water and built their own lakes in the sand.  The kids loved swimming, so we should have lots of fun over the next few days.  The only bad thing that happened was when Xander fell while climbing a slide that is in the water.  He cracked his head on the stairs and got quite a large bump.

After finishing with swimming, we went for supper, went to Safeway for supplies (since our motel room has a kitchenette) and then walked down the beach for ice cream, before putting three extremely tired children to bed.