Banff!

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

LOCATION:  Banff, AB

WEATHER:  Overcast for most of the day with some sunny breaks later in the afternoon - and frizzin'!

We started off the day by putting Dad to work on one of the chairs that had been rattled into sweet oblivion on some of the rougher parts of yesterday's trek.  It had turned itself into a rocker, which is all well and good until you bail backwards down the stairs.  Anyway, like everything else that goes wrong, Dad had it fixed in a jiff and once we were all mailboxed and ready to go, we headed downtown to do the tourist thing.

We parked well enough away from the hustle and bustle, now being fully aware of our overwhelming girth, and spent some time walking up and down Banff Avenue, checking out all the little (& expensive!) shops along the way.  All the streets are named after animals - like Lynx, Wolf, Otter, Beaver, Muskrat, Moose - and it really is a beautiful little town, with horse-drawn carriages making their way up and down the streets and mountains towering over the shops everywhere you turn.  We stopped for lunch at Boston Pizza (mmm, local cuisine) and after a bit more browsing (Mom scored a $20 Banff fleece jacket), we headed back to Beuls to make our way up the hill to check out the 'gondola up the mountain' situation.

Checking out the 'gondola up the mountain' situation proved to be an enormous disaster.  Cars everywhere (we were one of about three motorhomes that I saw all day and now I know why) and nine-foot-wide Beuls in a 10-foot-wide lane with bikers and JOGGERS WHO WON'T MOVE ONTO THE SHOULDER FOR ONE SECOND TO AVOID BEING FLATTENED while Mom had 79 heart attacks in the back.  So we scrapped the gondola, respected the alcohol ban by swingin' by the ol' liquor depot, and made our way back to the parking lot we called temporary home.  Dad thought it would go over well if we set up our folding chairs in the middle of the lot, started a big bonfire, and drank beer while brandishing guns and machetes and growling at whoever came near, but after some consideration, we decided against it.  Hahaha.  Instead, we finally busted out the bikes (and when I say 'busted,' I mean busted).  Mom somehow lost one of her pedals along our now 16-day journey and my bike blew a tire as it was being taken down off the rack.  With Mike's bike already in pretty sad shape, we dismantled it for the purposes of repairing our own and are now left with only three rideable bikes.  But Mike hopped on Dad's and I took my own and we took off for about an hour and headed back downtown to weave in and out of traffic like the bikers we had cursed before us.  Haha.

Later Dad found a trail that headed a ways up one of the mountains surrounding our campground, and he and Mike went hiking for almost two hours while Mom and I decided where we'd head next if they crossed paths with a griz.  Thankfully, there were no griz sightings but they did spot two big fat mountain goats shimmying their way along a not even six-inch ledge.  By the end of it, they had hiked up roughly 3,000 ft, even stopping to sample some mountain H2O, and had some pretty impressive pictures to show for it.

As more folks piled onto the lot in their (Mike:) "Rent-a-Noob"s, we popped on some Planet Earth (being in the woodsy, nature-loving spirit we're all in these days) before hitting the sheets and dozing off to the ear-splitting wheeze of the furnace kicking in.   Tomorrow we're back on the road, destination unknown.

Letting the good times roll,