Kelowna, This Small City Is One of Canada’s Best-Kept Secrets

Set on Lake Okanagan, Kelowna is surrounded by vineyards, orchards, and mountains.
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This Small City Is One of Canada’s Best-Kept Secrets AFAR Media

With outdoor adventure and wine tours galore, Kelowna is also one of the country’s most accessible cities.

Cycling past burbling Mission Creek, my teenage son maneuvers his purple trike on the wide, flat trail. We stop to look for wood ducks in the water, then pedal forward along the cottonwood-lined greenway. Bennett has autism, and he finds hills (and two wheels) a Challenge.

In the five years our family has been living in Kelowna, a small city in British Columbia’s mountainous heart, we’ve noticed more opportunities for our son to get active outdoors in spite of his cognitive disability and delayed motor skills. In winter he’s skied downhill with adaptive ski programs that offer lessons to kids and adults with visual and hearing impairments, physical disabilities, and neurological disorders such as ADHD and autism. Last summer he also paddled with an adaptive adventure company in a tandem kayak, and I didn’t worry about them tipping over since the watercraft was kitted out with a pontoon outrigger. The instructor gave him paddling pointers while they floated past vineyards and orchards on scenic Okanagan Lake.

Many of these activities would previously have been out of reach for kids like Bennett or for those in a wheelchair. Recently, though, there’s been a focus on improving accessibility in hotels, at parks, and during activities like winetasting, to welcome multi-gen families, seniors, and those with disabilities.

“We want to create a tourism environment that’s inclusive of all people regardless of ability, age, culture, gender,” says Sonja Gaudet, regional access and inclusion liaison with the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association. “Everyone should have full access to different experiences.”

Bike rentals and multi-use trails
Instead of lugging a heavy adapted bike on holiday, rent one from Kelowna Bike Rentals. Located downtown, the company lends out trikes, hand cycles, and upright and recumbent tandem bikes. This makes it easy for mobility-challenged tourists to get cycling the Waterfront Boardwalk or the city’s 186 miles of designated bike lanes.

The new Okanagan Rail Trail begins downtown and winds north 32 miles past three blue lakes and numerous sandy beaches all the way to the city of Vernon. The path, a former railway line, is paved in town, with flat-packed gravel the rest of the way. There are accessible washrooms along the route, plus interpretive signs that tell the region’s Indigenous history.

Myra Canyon, Kelowna’s flagship trail ...

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