Touring the Canadian Rockies

After leaving Vancouver, we headed for the gorgeous Canadian Rockies. Being from dry Arizona, it was amazing to see water everywhere.  Rivers, water flowing along the ditches of the road in many areas, coming down off the mountain in a waterfall. There was so much water that it got to a point where everyone almost quit looking when you said waterfall.

Glaciers, snow capped mountains like this one.  And of course, there were the clouds. It was usually raining or threatening to rain.  The clouds were interesting to me; I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many low ones. There would be little solitary wisps of clouds suspended quite low.

Driving along, in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere pretty much means anywhere in Canada that is not a city. The population seems to stay in the cities and not be spread out like here in the U.S.  But anyways, driving along we passed this gorgeous Chateau. That’s a lot of rooms!  Maybe it’s for all those travellers that are trying to get to the city and they’re stranded in the mountains because the roads become impassable and they have to wait for the spring. Or did that only happen long ago? 🙂

We had read that Emerald Lake was a must see, so that was our destination as we were driving towards famous Lake Louise.  It really was a must-see, don’t you think? It’s glacier fed. The surroundings were so peaceful, quiet and had a very secluded feeling. There were lodges you could rent. The restaurant “Cilantro” (rather an odd name for a restaurant, I think) was closed but it looked so picturesque in its surroundings with its bright yellow umbrellas.  We could see a menu posted and the prices were quite high. For a salad with candied nuts on top and some fruit it was $12. When did lettuce become so rare? Maybe transportation costs to get it here?

Seth had packed his powerful spotting scope along. This became a common sight – him peering through the scope. In this instance he picked out a waterfall that I thought was just frozen snow.

I was doing a little reading online about the Emerald Lake Lodge and it says that Sunset Magazine named it one of their “top 9 cozy winter lodges.”

Panorama of Emerald Lake

Lake Louise and Emerald Lake are very close to each other, so after leaving Emerald Lake we drove to Lake Louise. The last time I was here was 23 years ago on our honeymoon. We rode the train from Vancouver through the Canadian Rockies, stopping at Lake Louise & Banff.  It was gorgeous scenery the whole way!

Our wedding was on April 22 and when we arrived at Lake Louise 23 years ago, the lake was still mostly frozen.  Russell thought that since we were going in June, it would be completely melted.  It was, mostly, but not yet all the way.

I remembered the pain all over again of getting a Christmas photo, when we tried to take photos of the kids. 🙂

I know the captions are a little hard to read, so I’ll list them below starting at the top left photo.

1. sister pulling away from brother who’s trying to “manage” sister

2. after a mother/daughter talk

3. let’s keep the eyes open, shall we?

4. 5 out of 6 looking at the camera with eye’s open. good enough.

That night, we, maybe it was just me(?) laughed as I said, “Twenty-three years ago on our honeymoon we stayed at the Chateau Lake Louise, a beautiful room, fresh flowers – everything top-notch.  Now 23 years later, I’m back and staying in a tent in the rain. And that’s what we did. We The boys set up our tent in the rain and it rained almost all night. The next day when we picked up Justus’ sleeping mat there were puddles underneath.  Zach’s sleeping bag was soaked (he had 2, so one was fairly dry) but the rest of us were nice and toasty. It really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Zach & Justus didn’t seem to mind either and they were really the only ones that had anything to complain about.

These are the things you do when on a budget trip. 🙂