Day 13, July 22, 2011 - In Banff

I cannot say that we were up bright and early today. Jimmy had already been up and shaved before I even knew it was morning. Travis was all curled up on the couch under the blanket. Once we all got our eyes opened, breakfast in us, all of us showered and dressed, we were ready to head out for the day.

Sadly, it rained off and on all day. That did not deter these intrepid travelers!!!

As we drove into town, we saw our second wild animal of the trip. There was a doe mule deer dining on the fresh, tender grass on the side of the street as we came down from the campground. We did not get a picture of her, as Travis was busy doing something and she just kind of appeared!!!

Our first stop was the gondola. We needed to find out how the Saturday night ride and dinner worked. We had bought the special tour on line, but they didn’t explain about how to determine when your meal seating would be. It is easy – you just get on the gondola, ride up to the top, go to the restaurant and arrange your seating. Then you can go off wandering on the top of the mountain until time to eat. There was also a Starbucks at the gondola station with a really strong wifi!!! I’m going to get the guys to head up to the gondola a little early on Saturday so that I can take the computer and upload all of my notes which I have kept in Word since we got to Canada!! I’ll not worry about uploading pictures until we are back in the States and have strong, consistent internet. And, I need to pay some bills!!!!!

From there, we headed off to the Fairmont Banff Hotel for pictures with the real camera. There is a golf tournament going on, but none of us recognized the name of the tournament. They had full sized pictures of the players, and I did recognize some of the names. The hotel was not quite as expected. We kind of were mentally comparing this railroad hotel to the ones that we had seen in Yellowstone. We were looking for the huge lobbies and restaurants, but that is not what we found. The entry lobby was utilitarian. As we climbed to the second level, we all thought it was really dark. But, the restaurants and grille were beautiful. We went out on the patio overlooking the Bow River and could easily visualize how it would have looked on a sunny day. The croquet field was set up in the event anyone would want to play a game. The outside tables were all covered, but you could still visualize how it would have been. The hotel is huge – very tall and very late 1800’s style. The elevators had been modernized, but they retained the semi-circular floor indicator – so when you saw the elevators – they still looked period. There was a room which was where tours of the hotel started. We were not there on a tour day, so we just read the inscriptions under the pictures. When the hotel first opened, the rooms were about $4 a night. We saw a bill for a family which spent 4 nights in the hotel in 1929, and their total bill was about $71. That included three or four meals also!!! One of the pictures said that during the 1920’s and 1930’s, rich people would arrive with $50,000 to fund their three to four month stay at the Fairmont and in Banff. After having seen the price for golf, the food prices (chicken sandwiches with sides were 60 cents), and everything else, I wonder what they needed that much money for!!!

The rain had increased a bit, so we decided to go back to the coach for lunch rather than finding a place to park in Banff and then finding a place to eat in the rain. Plus, we need to eat some of the food that is in the refrigerator!!!

The rain slacked off, and we headed back to town. I needed to change some more money from US bills to Canadian money. Plus, we wanted to go to the Park Headquarters at the end of Banff Avenue as they have absolutely beautiful grounds. There was a lady there in her wedding gown with the minister, her attendant and her daughter. Everyone was kind of hanging around waiting for the groom to arrive – which he did shortly after the photographer had finished taking pictures of the bride and her attendants. From there we headed back across the bridge to find a place to park the car. We should probably have just left the car at the park headquarters!!! Then we followed the path to the waterfalls which are close to the Banff Hotel. Of course, we wound up being on the wrong side of the Bow River. We should have taken the pathway on the Park Headquarters side of the bridge instead of the pathway on the Banff side of the river. But, Travis was able to get some good pictures. Here they are starting at the gondola area and ending with pictures from the walk to the falls.



After that walk (I think it was probably over a mile – but both Jimmy and Travis just laughed at me), we drove out of Banff to find highway 1A and Johnston Canyon. This is truly a canyon with a walkway along one bank of the river. Plus, there are supposed to be animals along the drive to the Canyon. I say supposed to be because they had signs all along, but we never saw anything that they indicated we would see. Again, we started the walk along the canyon wall. There were lots of small waterfalls. In my mind, we had seen the lower, middle and upper falls because my legs were tired so we had to have walked 3 or 4 miles. I stopped and stepped off the walkway and ask how far we were going only to find out that we had not yet reached the lower waterfall – a walk of about one half a mile. On top of the fact that everyone had to have been lying about the distances traveled and to be traveled, the pathway was along the side of the canyon and frequently consisted of walkways suspended out from the canyon wall. In other words, frequently there was nothing under me but air and a little steel attached to the canyon wall with super glue (I think). We finally arrived at the lower falls. I’m going to admit, the falls were awesome. There was a bridge across the river and a cave where you could literally go stand in the mist from the waterfall. I did not go into the cave. I did go over the bridge and look through the cave. For those of you who do not know, I am afraid of heights. When we were on the walkways, I was hugging the left side which was next to the canyon wall. I only went to the fall off and break your head side when other people felt it was necessary for their groups to return to the parking lot (which I thought was fairly thoughtless of them given that I needed all of the walkway in order to feel comfortable). I did realize that the walk back would be mostly downhill and that I would legitimately be able to hug the canyon wall!!! The only difficult spot was when I was hugging the wall going back and a lady was just as afraid of heights as I was and she wanted the wall also. We worked it out. We did see a lot of ground squirrels. They would just come right up to you. The signs all said not to feed them, but for them to have been so friendly, someone had fed them!!! One got about 2 inches from Travis’ leg while he was taking pictures of another one which was posing for him on a log which had fallen. These pictures are from the ones which Travis took on the walk. I probably should have deleted some of the pictures, but they were all really good in my opinion!!!



Tomorrow we are going to Lake Louise and then to our gondola ride with dinner on the top of Sulphur Moutain. Stayed tuned.