Folks - It's been a while since we posted and it seems like some of our formatting things have changed. I probably don't have the time to fix things while on the road, but the blog should still be readable. If there are any issues please let me know so I can address them. Thanks.
So far it's been a great day. There has been a lot of driving, and we are both a little tired, but the scenery has made up for it and we got to our destination early.
Earlier I was blogging away at the coffee shop, as fun as that was we are now in our hotel in Fairmont Hot Springs - just outside of Banff (actually Kootenay National Park in British Columbia)
After getting a caffeine fix, we walked downtown Banff. The national parks are different in this strange land of 'Canada' compared to the US; there are actual towns within the park boundaries, yet another interesting fact that we have picked up. Maybe we should do a documentary for National Geographic. Here we are with a typical Banff icon:
The people of Canada have a very interesting view of keeping the peace. They have a force of peace officers called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Pretty impressive, right? I'm not sure what the mounted part means, I thought it meant riding a horse but we keep seeing all of these moose references and we're not sure. Anyway, all we know is the mounted police ride around in Ford cars (shocking since the Canadian government doesn't own any portion of that car company). We'll keep the camera ready for police riding Moose.
Anyway, basck to our trip. We stopped at the continental divide which is also the border between the provinces (and the parks).
That's me with a foot in two different Canadian provinces. It took us about three hours (including stops) to make it to our hotel in Fairmont Hot Springs, but we saw some excellent scenery; here is one of the turnoffs:
As impressive as the views are, we had a violent thunderstorm roll through. Instead of separate thunderclaps, there were so many lightning strikes it was basically a constant rumble. The hail was pea-sized. It was actually nice since it helped cool things off. Here is the view outside our room:
Check out the hail collecting on the windshield wipers. Tomorrow is going to be a relaxing day at one of the hot springs pools. We'll keep you posted.
Mr. & Mrs. O'Brien arrived in Canadia with no issues and we grabbed a shuttle to the hotel where we took a dip in the pool and got an early night's sleep. The hotel pool had a two story fully enclosed corkscrew waterslide which we played on with the other 10 year olds.
We got up fairly early to get our car and start exploring this strange land. I must say the drive has been beautiful but we are still trying to adjust to the quirks of the culture; it's almost like a different country! They have this very strange thing called the metric system, I'll try to figure out how to explain it and tell you more in a later post.
Anyway we arrived in Banff shortly after 11am. Here's proof:
The first thing we did was find a nice coffee shop with internet access and put up a few pictures. Debbie had some organic chai tea (extra foam). The coffee shop is the Wild Flour Bakery. We are about to spend some time walking around town. Here's Deb outside the coffee shop with the Rockies in the background.
Thank you everybody for making the weekend so memorable. Here are a couple of photos snapped by friends, of course we had to show the cakes. Now that the party is over we are off to the Canadian Rockies.
