Day 10 - Banff National Park, Alberta (Canada)
Friday 6/30/2006
I had inquired about things to do at the Tourist Information in downtown Banff yesterday. Today we had a couple of things to do. We started the day by hiking up to the top of Tunnel Mountain. The hike was not difficult. It provided a couple of good views.
A view of Banff from Tunnel Mountain
Erik is such a caveman..
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| Assorted trees, bushes and plants seen on the hike .. don't ask us to name all | |||
A view from the other side: Banff's Golf Course nestled into the valley (built by forced labor around 1917)
After a nice hike up the moutain we headed off to try a hike around a marsh area known as "Cave and Basin". This is an area that was developed around a hot spring in the early part of the 20th century. There is an educational boardwalk that takes you around a marsh area that is downstream of the hot spring. It has developed a curious micro climate. For one thing, parts of the vegetation around the streams coming out of the hot spring stays green all year around. Consider this in the context of high elevation in the Rockies where it gets cold and plenty of snow. We started out by taking the boardwalk tour, looking around and reading informative signs. As with any sulphur based springs, it smells just like someone farted as you walk around. And with the background sound of rushing waters you can safely let go of something that would normally take off the barn doors and nobody would even know..
Tiny fish live here all year around in the warm waters despite it being very cold in nature around the springs
An abundance of weird creatures can be seen from the boardwalk
Hippies experimented with all sorfs of cocktails (for themselves and for nature)
Erik and Isabella looking for tropical fish
After the boardwalk, we paid admissoin and got inside a small museum they have at the Cave and Basin. We first walked into an underground hot springs cave, supposedly the one found in the early 1880s by explorers. After that we watched an amusing movie about these hot springs and how Banff ended up being Canada's first national park, with many more to follow.
The kids, inside the original hot springs cave (Karl thought it stank so he held his breath)
A bubbling pool outside of Basin. Close your eyes and you could have been at a waste water plant.
After all the excitement we were all very hungry. The kids had asked for eating out for a while so this seemed as good as day. We drove into downtown Banff and started to stroll Main street. They have plenty of restaurants, including very well masked McDonalds and a Subway. We ended up finding a bar which served on a roof patio, giving us a great view of the mountains.
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| Isabella gets a Shepard's pie | Erik gets a Bison burger |
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| Karl gets a Spare Ribs burger | And I get a Bison burger like Erik |
The food was good and we all cleaned our plates. After eating we went strolling around in Banff, looking for T-shirts and other souvenirs. Turns out that the T-shirts were not very unique. They seemed to use rather generic graphics with the text "Banff, Canada" added to them. I found it very hard to find a shirt that did not say Canada somewhere on it. This is almost the reverse of the US. In the US only a small percentage of souvenir shirts say USA. Erik got some postcards and stamps. We went by a local grocery store where everything was really expensive. But we did not have much choice since we were running out of several supplies. No alcohol was available at the store, like in Quebec. Not even beer. We returned back to the trailer, ate an early dinner and watched Dave Chapelle's "Block Party" movie on DVD. We hooked up the truck to the trailer and got to bed. Tomorrow we're heading up towards Jasper.