Adventures in Lake Louise and Banff

So we left Vancouver on friday afternoon, flew to Calgary and caught the greyhound to Lake Louise that night. Stiena and Marc met us at the bus and we dumped our gear at their place before going to a local watering hole for a feed. The next morning Justin and I headed out to see a little of the town and were completely floored by the view...








We walked the 5ks from Lake Louise village to the lake itself with the monstrous chateaux. We didn't realise there was a cross country ski track and so we walked along side the road! No less than half a dozen times did we fall through snow up to our knees. On the walk we passed the start point for a local dog sledding tour. We'd only ever seen dog sleds on TV so that was pretty cool.

On Sunday we caught a bus into Banff town in Banff national park. It's not very large but services the local ski hills of which there are about half a dozen so there are the usual shops and pubs and things. I was really amazed when I saw a bloody Louis Vuitton shop!!! Anyway, the highlight was catching the Banff gondola to the top of Sulfur Mountain. When we got up there we checked the thermometer and the temperature was -6 celcius and pretty windy. We walked along a boardwalk from the gondola to the peak, which is an elevation of approximately 2300m. The view was superb.


Afterwards we caught the gondola down and went to the Banff Hot Spring, which is a sulfur pool where you can swim, but they were closed due to maintenance. We were pretty disappointed as we were really looking forward to a dip. We consoled ourselves by finding an Irish pub and wiling the afternoon away in typical Mel and Justin fashion with Kilkenny, Guinness and pub fare!

Yesterday Justin went snowboarding at Lake Louise, my knee was still giving me niggly pain so I decided to skip.  We were going to go snowshoeing that afternoon but Justin had taxed himself to the max snowboarding so we went to the pub instead with Marc and played board games.  Marc is the unofficial scrabble champion!

This morning we caught the greyhound back to Calgary and after a bit of hunger-induced grumpiness on the inner city train, we found the hostel and checked in.  We've decided to go to the Calgary Zoo tomorrow as that's about the most inspired thing we can think of to do in this town.  It's concrete, concrete and yet more concrete!  Oh, and dirt... lots of dirt.  To give the city some credit it is the middle of winter and all the foliage is dead.

New photos under the Lake Louise & Banff album.  I'm sure if you check in a few days we'll have some photos of Justin doing ape impressions at the zoo.

Cheers,
Melanie
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