Still Smoking

...well, not literally, but we haven't died yet!

First of all , I need to apologise for all the pictures in this update...will probably cripple all you poor modem users (Christine!) , never mind....just trust me when I say for every one picture we post, there's 80 more on my computer and in MUCH higher resolution.

It's been a slow few weeks(as you can tell by Caren's last post), and the reality of still being unemployed has hit us both fairly hard; Still, we keep powering on regardless...

To keep ourselves busy, we've been hard on the tourist activities :)

Last Saturday we went to Calgary Zoo (apparently one of the best in the world). It was a beautiful day, and we took our time wandering around checking out the cool exhibits and animals... It certainly is an awesome Zoo...very green, and natural.

Plenty of weird and wonderful creatures to stare at...Bears, Tigers, Lions, elephants , Monkeys etc..

It was nice to spend the day outdoors, and now that the weather is improving, we'll be trying to do a lot more (though not as much as if we had jobs!)

On Sunday, we rented a Car and headed up to Banff /Jasper to have a proper look around for a couple of days.

Car's are much cheaper to rent here, and we ended up getting a brand new (32km's on the clock) 2004 Ford Taurus SE (V6),which for all of Sunday / Monday + unlimited K's cost us around $60 !

So, the Plan was to head up to Banff national park, carry on through to Jasper national park and go check out the Columbia Icefiled / Athabasca Glacier.

We caught the Steven Express to the train station in order to get into town to pick up the car at 9am.

For my first experience driving on the "wrong" side of the road, everything went pretty smooth...Caren managed to navigate us out of downtown Calgary, and onto the main highway leading up to Banff.

The weather was amazing, not a cloud in the sky, which made for a nice 3ish hours driving (about 250KM's I think), we stopped off in Banff to check out the Banff hot springs, a small natural hot spring that used to be a Wold War 1 "illegal alien" work camp.

It smelled just like Rotorua (much to the American tourists disgust :)

I should point out that it is WALL TO WALL amazing mountains / valleys on this entire drive..just...too stunning to put properly into words (dont worry, we got plenty of photo's of snowymountains :)

We weren't driving hard, and stopped off for lunch in Lake Louise.

Another few hours drive North (and a driver swap) and we were at the Columbia Icefield's , near the entrance to Jasper national park.

We parked up and booked ourselves on a Glacier tour bus...which is a giant 6 wheel drive specialised vehicle for driving on the Glacier...only 22 of these in the world , and 21 of them are in service doing this tour.

A quick 15 minute Bus ride , and some interesting Glacier / Icefield facts later, and we were on the Glacier

Very Very cool, although just a tad too commercial for mine and Caren's tastes (why couldn't they have just heli-lifted us onto the Glacier proper and left us too it for a couple of hours??).

Still, we got to Drink pure Glacier melt water (yummy) straight off the ice-melt, and ..well hell, we got to walk about on a Glacier, which is pretty f%&@ken cool :).

The view, of course, was amazing, and I got a bunch of cool photo's, but, to reduce them and post them up here would not do them justice, so you'll just have to wait till we get home to see 'em.

It was about 6pm at that stage (don't worry, the sun doesn’t set till 11:45pm up there!) , so we set off back down South to find the lodgings we had booked in Lake Louise.

On the way there, we saw a Baby Grizzly bear on the side of the road, which was pretty cool!..but we didn’t stop to take photo's as we were in the middle of a highway.

A few wrong turns later, and we finally found our hotel....a dinky (read: crappy) hotel / motel just over the British Columbia border.

We grabbed some dinner in at Lake Louise village, and called it a night.

We had tickets for the Lake Louise Ski Resort Gondolier (pictures of the lodge in an earlier posting down the page) + free lunch on Monday, so we set out to find something to fill in the morning.

We ended up at a Beautiful lake called Lake Moraine, so called because the lake was carved out of the mountains by a glacier, and the walls around it are all moraine from the glacier itself (basically crushed rock).

We rented a Canoe and had a good row around the lake for an hour or so...once again, just too breathtakingly beautiful to properly put into words.

After building up a bit of an appetite, we headed to Lake Louise ski resort to do our Gondolier ride up the mountain (actually, just the ski lift's) .. which was, Surprise Surprise, AMAZINGINLY beautiful.

A Bigger / nicer version (though still reduced) version of that panoramic shot is here (click on the text)

What made it cooler is that we saw another Grizzly Bear wandering about under the chair lifts on the way, and this time we got to take pictures! (albeit not very good ones)

After that, and a nice Buffet lunch, we headed back down to Calgary to drop the car off and catch the Train / bus home.

A very fun little trip, which makes us more desperate to stay here, so..fingers crossed that ONE of us will get a good job in the next 2 - 3 weeks :)

bye for now.