Our Tripadeal holiday is labelled “value”, which is a  nice way of saying “budget” or “if we can shave a dollar” we will not hesitate. So while our hotel in Vernon was quite nice, the breakfast was on the cheap.

Anyway, that was the least of our issues on Friday. The inclement weather had washed out the main highway to Banff, so we needed to take a very wide diversion resulting in an additional 600 kilometres for the day, detouring via Kamloops and Jasper and the Icefields Parkway through to Banff. That all seems a bit mysterious, but we were exposed to some of most wonderful alpine trip through the Rockies, The day was very long and we had several breaks to allow our driver to do the trip within the various legal constraints on long distances. We stopped at Mount Robson National Park, Jasper, Lake Louise and the Banff, a gloriously pretty town. Thankfully the rain left us and we had clear weather and blue skies for much of the way. The melts from the snow had filled the rivers and lakes, and water streamed from the mountains in gushing waterfalls. The Parkway gives spectacular views of the alps and the many glaciers.

We pulled into Banff at around 11pm, tired but thankful for seeing this beautiful part of the world.  One thing we discovered, is the limitation of photography from a coach. By the time we were alerted to the sighting of a bear or elk, or a waterfall  or yet another stream bursting with water it was too late. So our stops were important to catch up with creating the visual record. The iPhone does a pretty good job and I have a newish compact camera, though I am still learning the ropes.

Saturday was a day given to backtracking up the Icefields Parkway for an excursion on the Athabasca Glacier. The weather gave us a different appreciation of the alps. We woke up with steady rain (not in our room, you will appreciate,  but in the outside bits. The rain soon turned to snow as the temperature dropped and we had a totally white landscape, and no vision of the mountains. The trip on the glacier is on an Ice Explorer, a large, slow vehicle seemingly capable of vertical descent and ascent. There were gasps as the Explorer approached a descent before crawling up to an area of the glacier where we could frolic. We even saw a few Bighorn Mountain Sheep on the glacier moraine.

We stopped at Lake Louise Fairmont Chateau on the way home for some pics of the pretty lake, and a late lunch in the hotel. Finally we were back in our much more modest pub. Jen took advantage of the laundry to catch up with our needs in that area.

Tomorrow is Sunday (actually today, as I write). We will attempt a border crossing, hoping to keep clear of Mr Trump’s ICE agents at border control. We believe this border is much more relaxed and the border staff wave you through with a polite “welcome to the United States.” We will see.