495 miles, 1 national park, 1 canoe ride, 1 oil change trip to the big city, 2 hikes, 6 nights of camping, 1 night at the nicest 20,000 person town we’ve seen for awhile. As far as budget goes, we came in at $4.35 over budget this week–oops!
We spent 6 amazing nights in Banff National Park ~ Canada’s 1st and most popular National Park. I am happy to report that we had no bear contact of any kind (although we did invest in the $75.00 bear spray). A deer did wander pretty close to our campsite every evening and last night right at dusk when you could hardly see it, a fox came trotting through the edge of our campsite on it’s way to bigger and better things. We saw elk and a muskrat on our canoe ride, many squirrels and some obnoxious jays at our campsite as well.
We had glorious weather the entire time & feel so lucky to have had mostly clear skies. Erin got some downright astounding pictures. There are so many National Geographic type vistas in every direction ~ even amateur photographers like us can capture them with a point and click. (See Erin’s post entitled O Canada for more details and beautiful photographs)
The city of Banff is much like many tourist towns in the Colorado Rockies ~ a crowded tourist attraction ~ especially in the summer. We are used to the Colorado Rockies crowds, but Banff is in a whole different class. We’ll give the city some credit though ~ they seem to have it figured out ~ the crowds were large but manageable, the town was crowded but walkable enough so you didn’t have to drive and deal with traffic and overall the sites and experiences were magnificent enough to take your mind off of all of that.
On our first full day ~ a Saturday ~ we found ourselves on the most popular hiking trail in the most popular Canadian National Park on the busiest day at the busiest time of the day hiking a very cool 2 mile hike with 1,200 of our closest friends. This is no joke ~ there were lots of people on the trail.
Much of our time in Banff was like that ~ lots of people/crowds but enough scenery and activity to be able to ignore the crowds.
We went into Calgary for an oil change after all the driving we’ve been doing and it was fun helping the service people convert our mileage into kilometers while trying to remember the most recent services we’ve had done on our car. We ended up doing laundry after the oil change and having a Bahn Mi sandwich for lunch while we waited ~ an interesting adventure all around since hardly anyone in the cafe spoke English.
Finally, we ended the week in Cranbrook, B.C., Canada, on the way to visit friends in Spokane, WA. Cranbrook is a lovely town close to the U.S./Canada border that has a good brewery with both a gluten free menu AND a vegan menu in addition to their regular menu. A bonus was the smooth jazz quartet that gave the whole place a surprisingly mellow vibe. Cranbrook is probably a great place to time in……..maybe another time.
PS ~ Salt lake City (2002) Vancouver (2010) and Calgary(1988) all hosted Olympic Winter Games and opening ceremonies……maybe we’ll have to add that to the counts?
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