Banff

Yesterday, Louise and I decided to take a drive to Banff just for the fun of it. I bought a Parks Pass on Ebay last September for half price and although I have gotten value back, I could have made better use of it. The original idea was that all of the family and friends could use the pass and save themselves $19 on a daily pass. Either no one went to the park or they didn’t think it worth the detour to my place to get the pass. Oh well…

 

The pass is good till the end of the month and we plan to use it once a week for the next two or three weeks. I always make excuses for not going to the park, but whenever I am there it is simply wonderful, winter or summer. People come from all over the world to see the wonders of Banff National Park and we who live an hour and a half away make the excuse that “…it will cost half a tank of gas”, or “…the traffic will be heavy on the way back.” Stupid really, but when something is close and familiar you just don’t appreciate it as you should.

Yesterday while at Johnson’s Canyon, I was talking to a young man from the UK who was visiting for about a week and a half. He and his wife had spent a day or two in the Banff area and from the canyon they were driving up to Jasper with a stop at the Athabasca glacier. From Jasper they were taking the train through the mountains to Vancouver for a day or so and then to Vancouver Island. They fly back to the UK from the island. Sounds like a great trip and already they were planning another visit in a year or two to catch the sights they missed this trip.

…and I don’t want to spend $20 in gas.

We heard so many accents and foreign languages yesterday that it made me want to hop on a plane and go see the wonders that they all take for granted in their home countries. Maybe they don’t, but it makes me feel better about myself to think that.

The weather was wonderful, hovering around the 27°C mark. We had the air conditioning on in the car on the highway, but kept the windows open when driving the slower roads. We had lunch in Banff and would have eaten on the patio if there had been a free table.

Today in Calgary the high was about 7°C but with the wind chill it felt like 2°C. That is a twenty degree difference in about twelve hours. To make matters worse, just around supper time a storm passed through and dropped a couple of inches of hail, so that the lawn looks like it did this winter. I had to scrape the hail away from my pea seedlings in the hopes that they won’t freeze overnight. It is above freezing but the hail will linger until tomorrow when it should warm up enough to make it disappear.

Well, it’s official. The furnace just turned on and I might just crank it up a little bit more. This weather sucks!