Blogs from Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada, North America - page 10

A brief entry this time as it’s yet another skiing trip and there isn’t much to them apart from skiing, eating and sleeping. But since it was in such a pretty place I thought it was worth a few words and pictures for your enjoyment (or pain, you decide). Having already booked a ski trip to France in for March, it was decided one trip was not enough. After only spending a week last year trying to get to grips with evil snowboarding (nearly there but plenty more work needed) I wanted a trip where I could actually get down a run without falling over. So a decision was made under the haze of New Year’s Day to have a sneaky trip to Canada for a bit of extra action. 24 hours later and a rather ... read more

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY!!! I never thought the Australia Day celebrations would be bigger in Canada than Australia, but they are. Amazing. The Hottest 100 was playing all day, and they shipped in Australian beer for us. Given 80% of the staff are Australian, I guess it makes sense. There was a DJ in the common area of Chucktown (I think the music was mainly Australian, but he seemed to focus on volume rather than sound quality), and everyone was having BBQs (once they melted all the snow off). This is probably a blog entry that will appeal to the girls - we’ve spent the last three-ish days shopping, and it was amazing. And, Paul was remarkably well behaved and even carried all the bags! In fact, he probably spent more money than I did. Both Paul ... read more

To start with, yes it's Friday night, we're still at the Lake and we're still bored in the evening. It's still autumn, and I have to advertise some temperatures that even Armidale will have trouble beating (one for the Canberra boys). These are temps from 9AM the last few days; Monday -19C, Tuesday -21C, Wednesday -23C and finally for the best of all Thursday -24C. No matter how good the heating is supposed to be, its having a bit of trouble at times. Today was remarkably warm... around the -15C mark!! Alcohol seems to be the activity of choice for the vast majority of the "Chucktown" residents - there's nothing else to do. One definite advantage is the possibility (and likelihood) each evening of convincing people to do and say some rather stupid things. For example, ... read more

Yes I know I have been rather slack in getting the travel blog up and running. Well as you can see we have well and truly arrived in Canada. After the longest Friday in recorded history (I belive about 40 hrs worth) we arrived in Vancouver to which I must say is one of the dodgiest hostels Liz and I have ever seen. But being too tired to really care we settled in for the night only for Vancouver to put on its best weather face and it did not stop raining the whole time. But not having time to spare we had to head to the airport again the next morning for our flight to Calgary. In Calgary the hostel was an excellent improvement and we spent the whole afternoon exploring the city centre of ... read more

As I have said before, I get uncomfortable with being a tourist. I try to be more of a traveler. I prefer to experience things, places and people rather than merely see them. But, while in the Rockies, we were definitely well and truly 100 percent the tourists. Today we drove to Lake Louise via the Bow Valley, stopping via Johnston Canyon and checking out Morraine Lake on the way home. Every one of these stops is clearly written on every tourist map. We were glad to be traveling in non-peak time, otherwise it would have felt like a circus. As it was, it felt busy. (Apparently in summer, peak time, Lake Louise gets 10 000 people visiting a day!) The drive through the Bow valley was stunning. We had to keep stopping to get out ... read more