Saturday, September 1, 2012

Jasper and Banff National Parks

This is a recap of the last several days. Starting with our leg from Golden into Jasper National Park to the north. That day was nice and sunny and we took plenty of photos/video with my little Canon pocketcam whilst driving. I have joined the videos together into one, posted below.


This was a posh hotel on our way into Jasper. There are railroad tracks to the left of it that go through the mountain and you get these really long trains that seem to go on forever. Neat!

Just some landscape shots. The mountains are amazing and make driving so much more fun than at home!
















Our campground for Jasper, this one is the Hinton/Jasper KOA and we had a guy leading us to our site. The owners were very friendly and this was a top notch campground. All facilities were clean and in good order. This is also the only campground in the area with wifi, however they get their internet via satellite so it is fairly slow. And in peak usage times in the evening it was unusable. I still give this high marks though and would use it again. We were there two nights.
Unbeknownst to us it is actually the last long weekend of the year for Canadians, and accordingly all the campgrounds are fully booked. The only reason we got a site is because this is actually 18km outside the park.

Some cool clouds while walking around in Jasper. This was on our second day, the weather was not good to us and it rained pretty much all day. So we were limited to going into the town of Jasper to look around the shops etc. My original plan was to do a hike in the morning followed by a boat tour of Maligne Lake in the afternoon, but yeah. Shit happens and we can't be lucky with the weather all the time.







On our way back to our campground for the second night. Heaps of cars/rvs pulled over whenever these guys were on the side of the road.



Photos from traveling in Jasper National Park. What a sight.
















Our trip from Jasper to Banff. The weather today was ok so we stopped in Jasper National Park to do a hike I had selected. Unfortunately due to the rain the entire path was muddy and it took us three hours to do the 4km round trip. I stacked it once but didn't fall on my ass at least. But yeah both our jeans and shoes need washing :)





Further along the road to Banff we stopped at the Columbia Icefields and I walked up to take photos of the glacier. You can actually walk up the glacier and they even have special snow buses that can take you up to the icefield itself.




Our RV is parked right above the brown house at the bottom. Simone was feeling cold already so she didn't get out and instead she waited for me.

The water is so clear you can barely see it. Lots of beautiful colours too.

Tonight after arriving in Banff and getting some yummy dinner at Melissa's Steakhouse, we still had yet to find a place to camp. And with the long weekend, all campgrounds within the park were full. So we went over to Tim Horton's for a drink and the free wifi, and we rang a few places outside the park. We found a spot at Spring Creek Mountain Village RV Park, which is in Canmore, about 20 mins outside the park. After initially only getting a partial hookup site (just power), I had a friendly chat with the girl at reception and she gave us the full hookup site instead for the same price (she didn't even think there was one left). The wifi here is great so far, not superfast but usable and pretty stable. Given the size of this park that's quite surprising - there must be 100+ RVs here.

So this is home for the next two nights, we have a fairly decent forecast for tomorrow so hopefully we get to do stuff in the park.

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