en route to Lake Louise

Despite a warm round of apparent indifference, I persist in posting more! Your feedback is welcome* - I can only imagine that photos of snow capped mountains don't do it for most people. I guess it is very normal for those in the north, but it sure as hell is different for someone who comes from a place where it NEVER snows. Also Australian mountains are in general pretty pathetic. Our ranges have been ground down over so many gazillions of years that there's only a couple of thousand metres (6,000') left if we are lucky. Mostly we aren't lucky. Plus not a whole lot of them get snow and nothing like the Rockies do.

The highlight of the short trip from Banff to Lake Louise on the Greyhound bus is this:


Castle Mountain.

There are other mountains and pretty views along the way


and a very interesting and pretty parkway to drive along if you have your own car, but this is The Big One.





We arrived at Lake Louise just at sunset.


After dragging our suitcases a few hundred metres through the snow, we found our lodgings for the night - the Lake Louise International Hostel. It's in two parts so if you go there you'll find reception at the back of the larger building on the left. Just follow the deck. Don't stand at the door to the rightwards building, like I did, and wonder why you can't get in. Duh!

At this point I should I found the international hostels in Calgary, Banff and Lake Louise to be clean and good places to stay, particularly if you are on a budget. I recommend them and would stay at them again, even if the Banff hostel is two km out of town. The Banff and Lake Louise hostels are quite new, which means they have nice furnishings and have not gotten shabby around the edges. (Though I would very much like it if the girls who shared the toilets with me, though not at the *exact* same time, had figured out that they were NOT auto-flushing - EWWWW!). I was surprised by the bed at Lake Louise when I flung myself on it - it was a 4" mattress pad. We had private rooms at each of them, though not always private bathrooms. The central Vancouver hostel was very interesting and they've tried hard to make it really funky, but it has challenges associated with old city buildings (including vermin problems) and does not have stoves/cookers/ranges due to fire regs! The Vancouver mob did fix our toilet promptly, as it kept flushing every 10 minutes, and the room was fine - rather cute in a vaguely art deco sort of way. Just don't get a room on the lower floors as there is a dance club under the hostel and boy does the noise travel! I have no idea why the Canadian hostels leave most of those in the USA so far in the dark - mebbe we have not stayed at the right hostels in the US.

Next - Way Too Many Pictures of a Very Snowy Lake Louise!

(*mrspao - this does not mean you need to comment on every post ;-) It is very sweet of you though)

Banff 2

We walked a lot around Banff. It was an education, walking in my snowboots (and discovering that they would rub my legs raw if I laced them up to the top! Ouch!). We don't get much snow and ice in Oz, and Banff had had a warm snap and rain and then cold temps, so there was plenty of ice. Shuffling seemed to be the best way to stay upright and minimise likelihood of slipping, and let me tell you there was PLENTY of opportunity for stacking on the ice. Some shops and homes kept their sidewalks clear and others? Welllll..... One of the slipperiest places was the Safeway carpark - lord knows what the local drivers do there but.

Speaking of the Safeway, it always surprises me when I go to a town and can't find gluten free food. After all, we were in a tourist town and gluten free food was pretty scarce. In retrospect, Calgary was a coeliac heaven - we did find a good organic supermarket, right by a light rail station, that stocked a good range of GF foods, including corn thins and a local GF bakery's products (GF/DF pumpkin pie! Oh it was YUMMY! I shall never see its likes again, alas!). An organic bakery had what they called "gluten free" brownies but when I asked, they said "oh, no, we can't guarantee they are gluten free!" So why call them gluten free? Low gluten is truer! We did have a good meal at the Rose and Crown pub - they did what I call pub food. They are one of the many eateries that are upstairs and are accessed by a set of doors and lots of stairs - hole in the wall type doors. The Safeway did not have a good range of GF foods. Indeed it had hardly any that I could find.

Enough crabbing. Banff was pretty, just not coeliac friendly.


(I am also terribly surprised that NOONE was using the bike rack by Bow Falls! Those are the rapids above Bow Falls in the pic below.)



(And NOONE was using the picnic tables. Like DOOOOOODS, it was only -17C, what are you, a pack of wusses? (If I wrote nancies, would anyone spank me?) Just cos your butts would freeze off if you sat on the snowy seats.... The odd crow/raven might steal your food cos they will be hungry too!)

But Banff was not about food. Banff was about cold and walking EVERYWHERE. Y'see they advertised a bus service that went past the youth hostel. The bus ran every 40 minutes. So after our meal the first night, we waited at the bus stop. We made sure that we had the right change, and then we saw the bus turn right one street before it reached the stop we were waiting at. We were confuzzled by this, and cranky cos it was cold and dark and we Had Had Enough. The map said the bus went past our stop.


(I am very cold in this shot - I don't have a nice lined tuque yet)

Turns out that we had the NEW new map. The bus had not been going along the main street as it had been closed due to extremely icy conditions. We had the map/timetable that was correct for the day after we left, not the current timetable. It made for crankiness as the walk was reasonably long and up a steady hill.

We never did manage to catch the bus.

It didn't run past these places:

Why do people like houses that are EXACTLY the same as the house next door? I must just prize individuality more than most (though you can find 20 of our house in our neighbourhood Back 'Ome, but at least the houses around ours are not the same as ours).

But jeez we saw a lot of prettiness.

(Cascade Mountain)

Lots of pretties!

(Mt Rundle)

Even more pretties!

(Mt Rundle)

More pretties than you can poke a stick at! Or maybe a hoodoo at


Pretties all round!


(up the river)


(down the river)

Too many pretties?


NEVER!




Some old railway hotel for you - the famous Banff Springs?


And from afar, on the road to the hoodoo gurus!

(The funny thing is that you think the hotel is up the hillside a fair way but really? It is in the valley!)

It has a great view along part of the Bow Valley - what a fabulous, ground out valley it is too!


How's this for a snow plough?


Looks just like the prow of a ship, for a similar reason, but it really is attached to this:


But alas, all good things must come to an end, so we moved on to LAKE LOUISE!