Canada - Part 2

 Letter No. 244

Dear all,

Continuing the story of our trip to Canada …

Day 10 – Jasper to Lake Louise. Christmas Eve started early with a 7am bus transfer from Jasper to Lake Louise. It was very cold and still dark when the bus arrived. As we climbed on board we were surprised to see Belinda Barrie, who had been Matt’s science teacher at BBC. She and her family were staying at the same place as us, and we subsequently bumped into them half a dozen times over the next two days. This is not actually the first time we have seen her on holiday outside of Brisbane, which is even more surprising. It is a small world.

It was 286km on “The Ice Highway” from the west to the east side of the Canadian Rockies. About half way we stopped at the Athabasca Glacier. There was a viewing platform on the edge of the road and you could see the light blue glacial ice about 10m thick on the mountain on the other side of the valley. It was quite amazing. The ice highway lived up to its name – it was ice nearly all the way and a little rough in places, like travelling on a dirt road!

We arrived at Chateau Lake Louise about 11am. It was impossibly beautiful with snow everywhere. All the pine trees were covered in snow and in some places it was about a metre thick. The Chateau looked like Santa had exploded on it with Christmas decorations everywhere. Our room was very luxurious with a fantastic view of the mountain and edge of the frozen lake. We even had our own miniature Christmas tree so we put all of our (small) presents underneath it. Katie was delighted at how perfect it looked. Various welcome platters and Christmas gifts arrived through the course of the afternoon.

We went to the pool, spa and steam room, then walked back through the grand reception just as Santa was handing out his presents to the little kids next to the enormous Christmas tree!  He must have been the real Santa as his beard was real. Jessie was too old for a present but we hung around anyway and went to say hello just before he left. That evening we had a banquet dinner at a Swiss restaurant called Walliser Stübe.  We had a cheese fondue, fabulous chateaubriand steak and then a chocolate fondue to finish. We were very full. There were Christmas carols around the tree afterwards with several hundred people there so Katie and I joined in the singing. It felt very special and very traditional.

Day 11 – Lake Louise. Christmas Day. We had a fantastic breakfast in bed on Christmas morning and opened our presents before phoning Australia and the UK to wish our families a Merry Christmas. Santa had found Matt and Jessie, to their surprise, and had given them useful cold-weather/Canadian gifts like socks, face scarves, chocolates and candied nuts. We even had a lovely Santa stocking from the hotel containing travel games, oranges and candy canes. A great start to the day.

Outside it was -28C. We had booked a late morning horse-drawn sleigh ride around the lake. The ride was very lovely and the views of the mountains, frozen lake and forest were absolutely beautiful but it was bitterly cold. I had seven layers on but was still frozen after the hour’s ride, so we went straight inside for gingerbread latte and hot chocolate.

In the afternoon we went ice skating on the frozen lake. It was much harder than ice skating in a rink as the ice was a bit lumpy and there was no rail at the edge to hold on to. I hadn’t been ice skating for some time but only had a few minor spills. The kids and Katie skated rings around me. Just as I was leaving the ice for the final time I wiped out and ended up flat on my back! We had booked a two-hour session but no-one lasted the full two hours and we all came in at separate times. Afterwards the girls had long soaks in the bath while Matt and I went to the spa to warm up.

We had booked a traditional Christmas dinner; however we discovered that there wasn’t a suitable vegetarian option for Jessie so we ended up in the Lakeview restaurant having a somewhat unorthodox Christmas meal of burgers! Katie wanted turkey so she had a turkey burger, Jessie had a veggie burger, I had a bison burger and Matt had smoky beef burger. Everyone was happy and we did have some festive entrees and champagne as well. A great Christmas Day.

Day 12 – Lake Louise to Banff. We had a long lie in on Boxing Day as we had a 10:45am transfer to Banff. The temperature was -29 with a 10 degree wind chill factor! Unfortunately we heard that our transfer bus had broken down on the ice highway we had crossed a couple of days earlier and they had to send out a replacement bus which would be an hour late. We had coffee and played chess in the lovely hotel lounge room until the bus came. As we were leaving the Chateau, Matt said that he thought it had been one of the most special Christmases he had ever had.

The drive to Banff was only about 45 minutes, which was good as the bus had obviously been sitting in freezing temperatures for some time with people on it and no heating. All of the internal windows were totally iced over from the frozen condensation! It was a cool trip and we kept all of our layers on. Fortunately the Caribou Lodge had a roaring fire in the lobby. Our room wasn’t ready so we walked into town, had lunch and sorted out our ski equipment. We decided we should all get ski helmets this time, which seems the normal thing to wear in Canada, so it turned into an expensive afternoon. Mind you buying them was only marginally more expensive than hiring them for the week. We went back to the lodge, checked in and the kids and I went straight to the spa for a sauna and steam room to warm up. That evening we braved the cold and walked a few doors down to a nice tapas bar for dinner.

Days 13 to 15 – Banff Skiing. Three days of skiing. Our ski pass allowed us to go to three different resorts and there was a fantastic bus service to get there and back, so we tried them all. The first day we went to Sunshine, the second Norquay and the third Lake Louise. The skiing was amazing and the runs are wide and open and often unmarked, so it was quite a different ski experience to Europe or Japan.  However, it was incredibly cold – definitely the coldest skiing we have ever done – at around minus 25 air temp plus a twelve-degree wind chill factor. We had no exposed skin whatsoever when we skied and multiple layers (hand warmers, toe warmers, helmet liners, glove liners etc). There is a real risk of hypothermia or frostbite if you stay out longer than two hours at those temperatures, so we skied in short sessions with lots of stops for hot chocolate and soup. The effort of putting on so many layers of clothes each day got old really quickly and the relief at taking them off at the end of each day was immense! It was too hard even to take photos as the effort of taking my hand out of my glove was too much to bear and anyway our hands were just too frozen to work properly.

Despite all this we had a great time skiing and enjoyed the different resorts. Katie has a terrible sense of direction when skiing and got lost several times, but she can ski faster than the rest of us so it didn’t matter too much. Our phones did not cope well with the cold, the batteries quickly died, so every morning we had to agree a place to meet for lunch in case we split up. Our lodge in Banff was very cosy and the big lounge with roaring fire was a welcome sight each afternoon as we staggered back in. We went into Banff town for a pub dinner the first night and then had two nights in the lodge. We ate at the lodge restaurant on the second night and then just ordered pizza in the room on the third night. We slept very well every night.

Day 16 & 17 - Banff Skiing. On our second last day of skiing we went back to Lake Louise as we had all enjoyed the skiing there so much. We split up in the morning and agreed a meeting point for lunch at a beautiful wooden ski lodge. It was one of our best days of skiing, especially as the sun had finally come out and the temperature had gone up a fraction to around -20C. At lunchtime Matt came in with a very long face and told us he had lost his phone. We had a very sombre lunch and decided to go with him to retrace his route on the ski lifts he had been on and ask the lift attendants if it had been handed in. No one had found it. Just as we were about to ski back to the main guest services centre, Katie was poked her ski stick in the snow where Matthew said he was standing and hit something hard. She reached down and pulled his phone out of about 30cm of snow. We almost couldn’t believe it and Matt was so happy! He raced off back to the lodge and dried it under the hot air hand drier in the bathroom. Astonishingly it worked perfectly.

On the bus home that afternoon we were stopped at a bus stop when we saw two boys out of the window sweeping through the snow with their feet. We joked that they were probably looking for a phone, which we thought was quite funny. We were astounded when the next minute they actually pulled a phone out of the snow and whooped with joy! Twice in one day - it was too much to believe.

That evening we went to The Grizzly House for dinner. It is a bit of a Banff institution and hard to get a table at a decent time. We had had to book several days earlier. The place is basically known for its variety of meat fondues and it is a huge humming restaurant with a very lively vibe. We had a really fun night. Katie and Jessie shared a yummy vegetarian cheese fondue while Matthew and I had a Hunters meat fondue with bison, wild boar and venison, which was delicious!

The next day was our last day of skiing. By coincidence one of Matt’s best school friends Alex Russell and his family had arrived in Banff the day before and we all agreed to meet at Sunshine in the main cafe at 10am. Katie knew Alex’s mum and dad Julia and Stuart through her BBC connections and Jessie knew Alex’s sister Kate who had been in the year above her at St Aidan’s. We ended up skiing together most of the day and the kids all had a great time together. It was a lovely sunny day at Sunshine and was the warmest day yet at only -15C, which felt like a real improvement so we really enjoyed our final ski.

That evening was New Year’s Eve. The Russell’s were travelling with another family who have four kids and they were all staying in a lodge just three doors down from ours. Julia had booked the Mexican restaurant there for a New Year’s Eve dinner and we had a lovely celebratory dinner with six adults and eight kids. After dinner all the kids went off to the outdoor spa while the adults moved to the bar. There were apparently going to be fireworks in the town centre, but we decided to give them a miss, due to the cold. We made it to midnight, sang Auld Lang Syne and rugged up for the short walk back to the Lodge. It was a very nice New Year’s Eve and good to spend it with a crowd.

Day 18 – Banff - New Year’s Day. Our final day in Banff was a relaxing one, as we recovered from five days of skiing and had a proper look around the pretty town. Banff is very picturesque with alpine style timber buildings and we spent the morning wandering around the shops. Jessie found a Vegan restaurant which she was keen to try so we all had a vegetarian lunch. In the afternoon we went to the Banff Upper Hot Springs, which are naturally hot outdoor volcanic springs. They had been closed for a few days due to the freeze but had reopened when it warmed up to minus 20! The springs were outdoors with snow and ice all around the pool and icicles dangling off the handrails. It was a little chilly walking from the change rooms to the pool and Katie almost couldn’t do it. Once in the water, it was a strange feeling. Our bodies were at +40 degrees in the water and our heads at -20 degrees in the air. The hair on our head was white with frost after we got our hair wet! Despite this it was very relaxing. There were lifeguards on duty but I am not sure how much use they would be if someone was in trouble as they were rugged up in ski clothes to keep warm. For our final night in Banff we had booked the steak restaurant in our Lodge for dinner with the crowd from the previous night. We had another fun night but didn’t stay up too late.

Day 19 – Banff to Calgary.  We had a transfer to Calgary which is a 150km road journey. The roads were still very icy and in the 90-minute journey we saw six cars which had skidded off the road into a snow drift. Our accommodation was close to the city centre so we walked in to grab a late lunch. The city centre itself seemed very quiet; we were surprised at how deserted the streets were and how few shops there were right in the centre of Calgary, but the people we met seemed very friendly. It was warmer by this time, only -4C, so we felt more comfortable walking around, but the icy roads and pavements were quite treacherous. Apparently there can be snow on the ground for around 6 months of every year, up to May. We went to the Glenbow Museum in the afternoon. It was a huge museum covering the history of Alberta, Calgary, the First Nations (Indians) and a spectacular display of rocks and minerals.

Day 20 – Drumheller and the Badlands.  This was a full day tour to the Alberta Badlands and to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. It was about 180km to get there, which was a 90-minute drive. Alberta can be summed up in three words – beef, oil and fossils! We passed through endless (snow covered) fields or prairies, which were so flat that we could literally see for miles. Alberta is Beef country but is also one of the largest oil producing regions in the world. Dotted across the fields were thousands and thousands of oil well heads, pumping continuously. The whole area looked like Little House on the Prairies country with oil wells. It was an iconic sight.

We stopped at a canyon on the way which had apparently formed when a glacier dam burst about ten thousand years ago and the flood waters carved out a spectacular canyon system around 150m deep. It was a deep gash through the otherwise wide flat plains. The canyons were used for horse rustling over the years and became known as the Badlands, partly because they were not good areas for growing food or raising cattle and partly because of the “bad” people who lived there. The canyons are also sites where enormous numbers of dinosaur fossils have been found over the years. The Albertosaurus was first found in the Horseshoe Canyon and was named after the state.

As we came into Drumheller the scenery looked just like the country you see in American Western movies – except covered in snow. The dinosaur museum was quite spectacular and had the most awesome display of fossils and exhibits we have ever seen, including full T-Rex’s still in the matrix, Triceratops, Parasaurolophus and practically every dinosaur you have ever heard of, plus a Jurassic garden and other interesting displays. The fossils were all real, not casts as in so many other museums. The museum is an active centre for palaeontological research, so we watched activity in the lab where the technicians were preparing the fossils for display and study which was also fascinating. One large Ankylosaurus took a single technician five years to prepare for display. We spent nearly three hours there and had a quick bite in the café before we were picked up again. Next we drove around Drumheller, which is a small town famed only for its dinosaur connections and is now on dinosaur overload. Every street is named after a dinosaur and there are models on every street corner including the Big Dino, a particularly impressive 25m tall T-Rex which is (apparently) the tallest in the world. Our tour guide then took us on a little side trip to the eleven bridges and the Last Chance Saloon where we had a drink and admired the quirky 1940s and 1950s memorabilia. We also stopped at the mushroom-shaped Hoodooes, geological shapes formed over many years by wind erosion. There was so much to see in the area and we all agreed that this had been one of the best days of our trip. On the drive back in the late afternoon we spotted coyote, elk, a lone moose and also passed a Bison farm. They were big!

Day 21 – Calgary Our last day in Calgary was fairly quiet. We went to Fort Calgary in the morning which was the first official settlement in Calgary. It was a nice small museum covering the history of Calgary to present day. We spent the rest of the day wandering around Calgary and doing a spot of clothes shopping. That evening we went out to a steak restaurant to sample some delicious Alberta beef before heading back to the room to pack for our long return journey.

Day 22 – Calgary to Los Angeles We had a 4am start from Calgary airport for our short flight to Los Angeles. Our bags had already been checked through to Melbourne and we had cleared US Customs in Calgary, so the whole experience was much quicker and we only had our day packs for our 10 hours in LA. We started out in Hollywood Boulevard so that the kids could see the stars and the Hollywood sign. The first star we saw was “Donald Trump” which surprised us a little. It appeared that it was regularly vandalised! He had got his star quite a few years ago for appearing on “The Apprentice” which we thought was stretching the concept a little. The kids enjoyed seeing the stars and the Chinese Theatre forecourt and we had lunch with a view of the Hollywood sign. We then caught a taxi to Santa Monica Pier. The traffic was horrendous and it took around an hour for a 12km trip, but it was really nice at the pier.  We spent the afternoon wandering around looking at the stalls and rides and watching the fishermen and a lone seal at the end of the pier. Afterwards we walked along the beach boardwalk and stopped at a café for a drink. Matt wanted to go on to Venice Beach which was the next beach along. It was a bit too far to walk in the time we had left, so we caught an Uber down and wandered around looking at all the stalls, street performers and the show-offs exercising in the open air gym. We had a bite to eat in quite a cool restaurant and then headed back to the airport.

Day 23 – Los Angeles to Brisbane The final journey was a very long trip where we lost a day over the date line back to Melbourne. We nearly missed our flight back to Brisbane as I didn’t get processed through the automatic gates properly and got separated from the rest of the family. I had to be questioned and re-processed which took about 30 minutes and then we were fast-tracked to our gate. We made it home by lunchtime and the house was still there with no problems. We love our journeys but it is always nice to come home.

Cheers

Derek, Katie, Matt, Jessie & Molly