Bear Creek is the night. It sits on the west shore of Okanagan Lake on a cottonwood delta, where Lambly Creek comes down out of the hills and spreads into the water, and through the summer it is reserved solid. Sites go through camping.bcparks.ca, and new inventory opens three months ahead at 7 a.m. Pacific, which is the hour the good July and August weekends go. Book the site first and the van second.
Then the beach. Lambly Creek has laid down more than 400 metres of coarse sand a few steps from the sites, and the Canyon Trail leaves from behind it, up the rim above the creek and back down a staircase, about an hour.
Getting there is quick. South out of Kelowna on Highway 97, over the floating bridge, then west on Westside Road for seven kilometres to the entrance just past the bridge over Lambly Creek. Vans do fine on the gravel pads, and some sites have power and water if you would rather not run the battery down in the heat.
If you're eyeing something bigger than a van for the extra beds, RV rentals in West Kelowna put the larger rigs in front of you, and you'll want to match the unit to the pad before you book a specific site.
Cross the valley one day for the Myra Canyon trestles, the old Kettle Valley Railway line curling around the canyon on sixteen wood trestles and through two tunnels high over the drop. Getting up is 8 kilometres of gravel forest-service road east of Kelowna, and there's no camping at the top, so it's a day out and back to camp.
Westside Wine Trail
Give a full day to the Westside Wine Trail, seventeen or eighteen tasting rooms strung along Boucherie Road and the Glencoe and Gellatly farm-gate cluster, most about a quarter-hour from the campground. The benches climb Mount Boucherie with the lake below them, and Mission Hill's hilltop cellar and the Quails' Gate patio are the two names people book first. It's tasting and driving on the same road, so line up a designated driver or a tour van before you go.
Fintry Provincial Park
When Bear Creek is full, or you want a longer beach and a waterfall to walk to, Fintry is the next camp up Westside Road, about 34 kilometres north of Kelowna on the same shore. It sits on the old Fintry Estate, two kilometres of waterfront on the Shorts Creek delta with an octagonal dairy barn still standing on it. The walk is the Shorts Creek staircase, milled lumber and chain-link platforms facing a two-tiered cascade, the top one looking straight down on the falls. Fintry sits on the same high-use reservation list as Bear Creek, so it books out on summer weekends too.
South down the lake the beaches belong to Penticton and its Skaha and Naramata shore; north, Vernon has Kalamalka Lake.