Avalon Inn

Booking a room in Osoyoos during high summer is a different exercise than booking one in April, and anyone who has tried both already knows it. The Avalon Inn stands at 9106 Main Street, on the downtown stretch where the highway, the shops and the lakeshore all run together within a few blocks.

Osoyoos sits at the very bottom of the valley against the United States border, in the hottest and driest interior country in Canada. That geography is the whole reason to come. The lake warms early and stays swimmable well past the point where water further up the valley has cooled off, the benches on both sides of town are planted in vines, and the desert scrub on the hillsides supports plants that grow almost nowhere else in the country. Conservation groups and the local First Nation maintain interpretive sites that explain that landscape to travellers who arrived expecting ordinary lake country. A room on Main Street puts all of it inside a very short radius.