Sept 18th:Day 30

The day began with a strange encounter. So, Lorraine takes Vinster out for his morning constitutional and she's stopped by this half a cop bylaw enforcement guy who informs her that THERE IS A TOTAL DOG BAN IN DOWNTOWN NELSON!?? 

Artist's rendering.

Apparently there was an attack 15 years ago and the"hippies" used to leave their dogs unattended to shit everywhere so they banned dogs completely on the two main streets. As you can imagine, this totally harshed our mellow but we put Vin in the car and went for coffee and breakfast. Our first priority was coffee at Oso Negro. Turns out it's outside of the dog ban area so the place was a mob scene of happy dogs and their happy, cool, mellow owners. Best coffee since leaving Toronto. We were back in love with Nelson. Breakfast was at The Full Circle cafe. I had been looking forward to their crab cakes with soft poached eggs and chipotle aioli/holandaise(?) sauce for the whole trip and they didn't disappoint. Lorraine had some kind of tofu scramble. I pitied her.

After that we bought some books, took Vin down to the lake for a ramble, had lunch at the Preserved Seed and bailed outta town headed for the Okanagan valley. 

Another scenic drive that flirts several times with the US border.

The landscape turns brown and scrubby as you come into the southern end of the valley.

The road cuts back forth down from the hills and there are stunning views of the vineyards, orchards and the town of Osoyoos around the lake.

Unfortunately, Osoyoos only looks good from a distance. 

It's like a backwater Florida beach town only without the culture.

The bad weather didn't help.

The jolly seniors that seemed to be everywhere were having a great time.

Passable greek fast food takeout for dinner.

Sept 17th:Day 29

What a surprise, raining. The drive to Nelson was long but pretty and the weather improved. Finding pet friendly accommodations with WiFi is always a challenge. We ended up at the Best Western downtown. Dinner was at The Whole Clove. Awesome moroccan lamb shanks.

No pictures. 

Sept 16th:Day 28

Started the day at Wild Flour bakery. Great breakfast and lattes. We shopped around town all day then we bought a chicken and roasted it up back at our resort unit.

Is anything better than a roast chicken?

No pictures.

Sept 15th:Day 27

 Finally, some decent weather! We back tracked to Lake Louise to hike the Path of Six Glaciers up to the tea house.

The trail starts up the valley at the far end of the lake from the Chateau.

The  glaciers drain into the lake here. The beach is very fine sediment carried down from high in the valley.

The trail gets amazing right away.

It follows the river for a while.

Then it climbs up the valley side. The horizontal moraines at the left show the path of the retreating glacier.

 

The tea house.

Lunch was mexican veggie chowder with homemade bread and masala chai

We could have happily stayed for hours but we headed back down.

You can't tell but there's a 100 ft drop on the right side of this trail and I'm peeing off of it.

Kidding. But it kind looks like I am right?

Vinnie had a swim in the lake when we got down and that is some seriously cold water.

We stayed at Banff Rocky Mountain resort. 

It sounds better than it was.

Had dinner at Beaujolais Bistro in town. They do the classics pretty well. I had steak tartare and Lorraine had coq au vin.

Sept 14th:Day 26

The weather was lousy again but improved to partially lousy later in the day.

We started the day with a hike at Meligne canyon. It's a favorite of the senior bus tour crowd.

It's an insanely deep slot canyon that was really roaring because of all the lovely rain we'd been getting.

It eventually levels out.

We headed for Banff  south on the Icefields Parkway.

We stopped for a slack-jawed gape at the Athabaska glacier.

And also this frigging spectacular place.

Some local celebrities being harassed by the paparazzi.

We stayed the night at Johnson canyon resort but we didn't go see the canyon.

We were all canyoned out.

Sept 13th:Day 25

The weather was lousy but we stuck to our plan to hike the "Path of the glacier and Edith Cavel  meadows".

The approach is up through the glacial moraine

The glacial pond is a brilliant turquoise strewn with fridge-sized icebergs.

This is the toe of the lower glacier with Angel glacier hanging above.

The hike up to the meadows gave us awesome views down on the pond.

We hiked up into snow. SNOW!!

In the background, across the valley, hangs Angel glacier.

This is about where we turned around. There was a grizzly bear warning  so we were singing and hollering the whole time so as not to surprise the mother and her cub.

We hiked out and ordered pizza for dinner.

Very bad pizza.

.

Sept 12th:Day 24

Tekarra has a restaurant that is considered Jasper's best but their breakfast buffet was pretty standard. We fueled up and went for a hike up a nearby peak known as "Old Fort Point".

From the top  you get a view of Jasper across the Athabaska river.

Part of the hike down the back side took us through a fairly recent forrest fire zone.

Apparently this can happen!

The forrest changed dramatically as we descended.

Down near the river, everything was blanketed in a gorgeous layer of moss. 

We walked into town for lunch and some shopping and had dinner at Tekarra.

Nice bison carpaccio.

Sept 11th:Day 23

Had another visit with Lorraine's Grandma. This time at her lovely, bright apartment. Then dim sum brunch and we were on the road again, headed for Jasper. 

This route really keeps you in suspense. You're sure you should be seeing the the mountains  but you don't . Then all of a sudden, there they are and you're in them. 

We took about 25 pictures of the mountains from the car before we calmed down.

The park was crawling with rented RVs full of Germans.

In Jasper, we stayed at Tekarra resort in this super cute, old school cabin.

You guessed it, we got out the wine and settled in.

Sept 10th:Day 22

The plan was to drive out of town and hike amongst the hoodoos but when we got there we were so underwhelmed we just drove on past.

We parked down a dirt road and went for a self-guided hike.

We followed a deer trail up the side of the canyon.

Barely visible right in the center of this photo is a mule deer looking right at me.

Told ya.

We came up out of the canyon and onto a rolling ocean of grass.

This landscape seemed to be Vinnie's idea of heaven. He ran around like a total maniac.

See?

We were surprisingly moved by this landscape as well.

It sure isn't Ontario.

Long, boring, rainy drive to Edmonton where we stayed with Lorraine's Uncle Alex and aunt Pat.

They took us for a quick tour of the West Edmonton Mall just before it closed.

Scary.

Had a Chinese feast with Alex, Pat, Lorraine's grandma, her cousin Jackie and her family. I was forced to eat way too much.

Sept 9th:Day 21

Drove out of Calgary in the pouring rain headed for Drummheller where I planned to let loose my long-surpressed inner dinosaur nerd and Lorraine planned to humor me. We hit an incredibly long stretch of road work on 72. It was 40 kms of slick muddy clay and several times we were on the verge of sliding off the road or into an oncoming vehicle. I was pretty clenched.

 The road drops into the badlands and all of a sudden you're in Drumheller where there must actually be a bylaw forcing all business owners to have some kind of dinosaur statue, no matter how lame or incorrect, in front of their establishments.

This is the largest lame dinosaur statue IN THE WORLD!

You can take stairs up into it (for a fee, of course) and look out of it's mouth. Maybe from up there you can see the Royal Tyrell  Museum where they keep the real deal.

That's Lorraine framed in his mouth. Clever, huh?

This is Black Beauty, one of the most complete Tyranosaur fossils ever found.

  

I totally geeked out.

Also, the cafeteria is very good.

There are some trails around the museum so we had our first chance to get out into the landscape.

Vinnie pooed on a hoodoo.

We stayed in a goofy little B&B. Yes, it had a dinosaur statue in front. We got some take-out Vietnamese and watched Madmen.