Series: Canadian Rockies

Rain, pouring rain. It had to happen at some point, especially in Vancouver, which is notorious for the quantity of its precipitation. At least the Pacific Northwest seems to have saved the wettest of the weather for our last day. The plan today is to check out the hotel and head towards Granville Island public market for breakfast and a look round before catching our late pm flight home. This seems a good plan, but didn’t account for the fun of actually getting off Highway 99 on to Granville Island. The bloody GPS again; it seems to love drawing indecipherable spaghetti roads on the screen and calling out turns on the opposite side of 4 lanes of traffic just as you’re passing them. You can tell we had fun. After a couple of passes I gave up and managed to approach the island from quieter roads on the landward side. Another frazzled start to the day courtesy of the Vancouver traffic. Continue reading “Granville Island and home”

Chateau Jasper turns out to be remarkably similar in feel to the Caribou Lodge back in Banff, with the same coach parties, and the same odd sense of things being temporary. Every time you pass through the lobby someone is checking-in or checking-out. As a hotel, the setup works well enough – you get a decent night’s sleep – but the whole experience of staying is oddly nebulous and forgettable, as if this part of your life is also transient. At least the coach parties had probably been onto the glacier and hence arrived much later than us the previous day. Jasper itself is a strange town, with a bit of a frontier feel to it. Exploring doesn’t take very long. The majority of shops and restaurants are along one side of Connaught Drive, with the opposite side being the railway. Most of the shops cater for either tourists or backpackers, selling a combination of trinkets and bear spray. There’s nothing there we really want to buy!

Continue reading “Jasper”

Today is our last day in Banff and our last breakfast at Tooloulou’s. After checking out of the Lodge (didn’t even look for free coffee today) we headed into town and parked in the now familiar Bear Street Car Park, a block from the restaurant. It was sad to see the huge choice of Eggs Benedict for the last time, but exciting to be moving on. When a man is tired of Banff, he’s probably been there about three days.

The first hour of the drive towards the Icefields Parkway was the same route along Highway 1 as we took to Lake Louise yesterday, and was despatched pretty quickly without fuss. The only thing we found noteworthy was the fairly frequent, and wide bridges over the highway. These appeared odd at first because rather than being flat on top, they had a couple of humps mirroring where the arches over the road were below. They also appeared to be full of bushes and trees. The continuous chain-link fences either side of the highway provided a further clue; these were animal bridges, not human ones. Rather clever, and probably essential to allow animals access to the wilderness either side of the road. Continue reading “Driving the Icefields Parkway”

There was no question that Tooloulou’s was going to figure on the breakfast agenda again this morning. After another fruitless hunt for the fabled free coffee in a lobby full of departing coach passengers, we gave up and rode the elevator down to the basement and took the car into the town centre instead. The reason for the early morning search for coffee is that the in-room facilities are a bit spartan on that front. Well there’s no kettle anyway. Instead there’s some kind of machine that brews coffee, but it looks like getting it running would be an enormous faff with paper filters and suchlike things, plus I am not entirely sure all the right ingredients are present. There’s no way I was going to be able to make a single cup of coffee with that and not make an unholy mess, so it felt safer to let someone else do it. This time I even managed to park practically outside the restaurant, which was nice.

Continue reading “Out to Lake Louise”

Our first day in Banff dawned bright and clear… actually, I am going to stop writing that because practically every day on this trip started that way apart from one, so I’ll save the weather report for the wet day and you can assume sunny starts unless I say otherwise. If nothing else it’ll keep the tension going (or perhaps not). Anyway, the hotel promised us hot tea and coffee in the lobby every morning, but when I went to investigate I found it had all been snaffled by the members of the many coach parties that had arrived throughout yesterday afternoon, and whom were currently either busy breakfasting in the packed hotel restaurant or thronging in the lobby waiting for their transport. Bloody tourists. Continue reading “In and around Banff”

Another clear morning and another breakfast at Nellies, as per yesterday. Well, why change a good thing? After a leisurely bag packing session to allow the rush hour traffic to calm down, we checked out and dug the car out of the bowels of the hotel and set off for Banff, about 125km away. Getting out of Calgary was a doddle. It’s easy to follow the SatNav, sorry GPS as it’s called here, when you have a) an idea how to work it and b) an idea where you’re actually going.

Continue reading “Into the West – Calgary to Banff”

We awoke in to find the morning was bright, clear and quickly warming up. The evening before we’d been placed high up on the 13th floor of the Sandman Hotel in Calgary but sadly the view from the room was mostly of other tall buildings. The hotel location though turned out to be a brilliant as it was on 7th Avenue and just across the road from the 8th Street CTrain stop. The CTrain light rail system services all of the downtown area of Calgary, (as well as the suburbs), but even more happily was free to ride in the central district that we’d need it for. But more on that later; breakfast first! Continue reading “Out and about in Calgary”