We're Back in The Fort!

We got home last night on Day 15 of our trip. Art is back to work today and my task is to get through the laundry and clean up a bit but first...

We left the Aquarium and crossed the Lion's Gate Bridge to get back on the highway out of the city. We did pretty good with navigating our way around and we were soon heading for Mission to see my artist friend, Joy, from our Cold Lake days. I called her and she had us meet her in Maple Ridge and we went to her brother's place for dinner and a family birthday. It was her niece's 5th birthday. Hannah had a great time playing with a little girl her age. Many thanks to the Robert's family for their hospitality, especially for the delicious home cooked meal. We spent 2 nights at Joy's place as her eldest daughter was away and she had plenty of room for us. Hannah was in Polly Pocket heaven as the girls had toys left over from days gone by. Joy has a million dollar view of Mount Baker from her dining room window which is also where she does her painting. Quite the creative inspiration, a view like that. I took some pics of some of her artwork with her permission and will post a couple of pieces. Our second day we took Hannah to a nearby waterpark and then for gelato. Art and Josiah were napping as we were actually planning on leaving but it was late and we didn't realize it was a four hour drive to our next destination so we decided to leave in the morning. We stayed up too late watching "What the bleep do we know" and doing mendhi over a bottle of wine. It was nice to see Joy again. She had left Cold Lake shortly after we did to head home to her native BC. Oh and by the way Chris, huge hug and lotsa love from Joy!

We left Mission and headed north to the Coquihalla Highway on the way to Merritt, then east on the Okanagan Connector to Kelowna, in total about a four hour drive. Back into the mountains again, the Lillooet Range on one side and far off in the distance are the Monashee Mountains on the other side. We stopped in Merritt for lunch and shopped at the gift shop there. The owners of the snack shack were from India, very nice people. We were headed for Ogopogo land. As legend would have it, the local Natives spoke of a lake demon called "N'ha-a-itk" in the Okanagan Lake long before white settlers ever came to the area. He's as famous here as the Loch Ness Monster is in Scotland. We made it to Kelowna in what I'd call rush hour traffic. Kelowna has a population of about 125,000 people but in the summer it probably doubles. There's an international airport, lots of shopping so it seems to be the hot spot for tourists. Kelowna is also in the heart of the Okanagan Valley. It's breathtakingly beautiful. Stretched out along the lakes are miles of fruit orchards and vineyards. We did not see Ogopogo although I caught myself thinking about him from time to time. It's a huge lake, surely there'd be enough room to hide a prehistoric dragon-like creature! We spent two nights with Art's friends Sharon and Todd Cashin and their 3 lovely children Will, Andrew and Finn. What a welcome break for the kids. They had so much fun. Todd and Art are friends from home, actually Todd is from Eastern Passage. We stayed in their carriage house in the back but Hannah spent most her time with the boys having so much fun that I even heard Will say he was going to hide in her suitcase and go home with us. They are going east in October so the kids will get to see each other again soon which seemed to be what allowed us to separate them less painfully. We took a short trip south to beautiful, Summerland and visited more friends of Art, Jon and Cory. Jon's an old soccer buddy of Art's from his Lethbridge days. Cory's sister dropped by with her children and Hannah had another playmate for the afternoon. John and Cory have two beautiful golden retrievers, Jake and Cherry, who also provided lots of entertainment for the kids.

We left Kelowna on Friday morning and headed north back into the Monashee Mountains, destination Golden. Sharon and Todd filled us in on where to go with the kids and even on where the next hotel with a waterslide would be. We stopped for lunch in Sicamous, the houseboat capital of Canada, and then again at a place called the Enchanted Forest. It has a nice walking trail and an interesting history. A very beautiful forest with 800 year old cedar trees and the biggest maple leaves I've ever seen from the Mountain Maple tree. The park gets its name from the hand crafted figurines of all the fairy tales made by a retired artist couple in the 1950's. The next town on our way was Revelstoke, hometown of Chris and Reid. Josiah had just fallen asleep so we didn't stop. It was raining when we passed through Glacier National Park but it was still beautiful. We were so high up we were level with the clouds. We spent the night at the Sportsman Lodge in Golden, pool with a waterslide, hot tub and saunas and wireless internet, something for everybody.

On August 12, Day 13: As you leave Golden on Highway #1 toward Yoho National Park you're driving into the Kootenay Mountains. We encountered the greatest amount of Olympic construction we've seen. They are expanding the highway here and have constructed huge cement walls along the highway probably to make travel safer due to avalanches. We came across 3 gigantic cement pillars approximately 5 stories high. Another one was being constructed up on the mountain in preparation for a huge bridge which will take you right over top of the mountain. An out of place structure, so much concrete in the wilderness. Progress affects the landscape, I wonder how it has affected the wildlife. We crossed the border back into Alberta around 12:30 on Saturday. We had just stopped at the Spiral Tunnels, an historic site that tells the tale of the early days of the dangerous journey the trains made through this area of the mountains. There's an area called the Kicking Horse Pass where there is a 4.5% grade, actually the steepest section of the mainline on the entire continent. It is so steep that when a 5 car train descended, the front of the train was 5 m below the rear end. On the old track the trains used to plunge at the rate of 45 m to each kilometre. How frightening is that?! I guess wrecks were common and they nicknamed it the "Big Hill". Where the old line plunged down the mountain, the new track makes a gentle zigzag across the entire valley and because each tunnel makes a complete spiralling turn, trains actually cross over themselves. It took 1,000 men 2 years to complete the tunnels. Pretty impressive. Next stop, Lake Louise for lunch. We picked up some postcards and a pass for the Icefields Parkway. We left Lake Louise and headed north on the #93. The Parkway runs between Lake Louise and Jasper covering 230 km of parkland, crossing two national parks and visible on the drive are 7 major glaciers and about 25 smaller ones. It is noted in the tourist pamphlet as "the most beautiful road in the world". I once thought the same thing of the drive through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba and a drive I took through Bavaria in Germany, beauty, I think, is a difficult thing to measure but it certainly is breathtaking and the icefields make it unique. It is hard to take it all in but impossible to stop too often with small children so we just drove and pointed out all the wonders we saw to one another as we went. Even Josiah was pointing and signing 'mountain' as we were oohing and aahing at every new sight. The beauty of it all is that it is untouched and protected land and so it's really just all about the magnificience of mother nature. We lost track of counting glaciers and trying to figure out which were major and which were minor ones. The weather changed drastically as we neared the Columbia Icefields, it quite literally became 'cold'. What can I say about it? If you haven't been there yourself, it's something you have to experience. As they say in the pamphlet, it's IMMENSE. It's more than twice the size of Vancouver, the ice is more than 365 metres thick, it reaches into both Banff and Jasper National Parks and it feeds three oceans, the Pacific, Atlantic and the Arctic. Hannah and I got out but it was so cold that we didn't last. You can actually take a tour, they have these gigantic tour buses that go out onto the icefield and you can walk around. We just weren't dressed for it though and we only had sandals to wear on our feet so it will be on the top of our list for 'next time'. We took pictures but they just do not do any justice to the beauty and the size of the glacier.

We got to Jasper at dinner time. We ate and shopped for a room but there were none available unless you wanted to spend $250 for the night. We ended up having to drive all the way to Hinton, another 45 minutes from Jasper. We had already driven a lot and we were pretty cranky. I think it was probably our longest day of driving on the whole trip. It was a nice drive through the park at that time of the day though. I actually like driving in the evening but it was just too much driving for Hannah and Josiah so we were usually hunkered down somewhere by this time every night. There was a lot of wildlife on the road and we took pictures of a caribou that was stopping traffic. We saw a sign for the Athabasca River which we found interesting because it actually runs through Fort McMurray too. It turns out that the river starts its journey from the melting snow of the Columbia Icefields and then makes its 1231 km trek to Lake Athabasca in the far northern reaches of Alberta almost to the Northwest Territories. It is the fourth largest lake entirely in Canada. It was after 8:00 pm when we reached Hinton and we were greeted by a native of Springhill, NS, who saw our licence plate. Nice guy but you could tell he'd been 'away' a long time. He said he could hear my accent! The motel was circa 1960, really rough but clean. We got the last room and 4 other motels in town were full too so we weren't complaining. It was supposed to have highspeed internet but it 'wasn't working'. It's been our experience that it is a selling feature and most proprietors don't really know to fix it if it isn't working.

The next morning we were backtracking into Jasper National Park again to get to Miette Hot Springs about a 45 minute drive from the motel. It's quite a bit of a drive off the highway up into the mountains. You climb for a bit and then you come back down and then things level out so it's hard to say where you are in terms of height. We saw lots of big horn sheep, they block the roadway and and hold up traffic. I guess they are fairly used to the traffic and don't seem to have any fear of people. The air temperature was cool in the morning but the water was 40 degrees which made the whole experience wonderful! Josiah was ready for a nap but he loves the water so much that he didn't complain at all. It's pretty easy to overdo it, I felt a bit of a headache coming on at one point and got out to get a drink of water. Hannah was playing and splashing around like it was a swimming pool. We tried to explain to her that you are supposed to just soak but you know kids. I'm absolutely no good in the sun too long and although it felt like you could stay there forever I knew when it was time for me to get out. Some guy ended up getting sick and had to be taken out and treated by the lifeguards. That was it for me...everybody out of the pool! Just in time too, Hannah was beginning to look splotchy with the beginnings of heatstroke. I put her under the cold shower and made her drink some water. The lifeguard checked her out and told me to keep an eye on her. The place isn't exactly family-oriented in that it has only two change rooms, one for men and one for women, and there isn't anything to do with toddlers. I was worried about Hannah so I made her sit on a bench while I took Josiah out to find Art. I was yelling his name in the men's change room all the while Josiah was screaming "Da". I think Art was going out one door while I was going in the other. I couldn't keep an eye on Hannah and an eye on Josiah while trying to get us all back into our clothes. I think a family change room would be helpful. After a few minutes Hannah's color returned to normal and she was fine. We had lunch in the mountains for the last time and it was with a sense of deep sadness that we made our final trip out of Jasper National Park. I clicked madly away with my camera taking the last pictures of the Rockies. Just before you leave the park there is a point where it looks as if the road will go right through the mountain and I was taking pictures of it as we were driving. I have a great sense of longing to live surrounded by the most beautiful and pristine creations of the universe which is what I love so much about the mountains and the ocean. If you have a spare $300,000 you could buy a house like ours in say Kelowna, minus the property of course. It turned out to be a hot day for driving. And did I mention that the AC was broken?! The old girl is pushing it actually, things are starting to go. At one point the speedometer had stopped working although that seemed to repair itself miraculously. We traveled in silence for awhile. Josiah had fallen asleep, Hannah and I plugged into our iPods and Art turned the radio on. I needed time to reflect and process all that had happened in the past two weeks and accept that it was almost over.

We spent our final night in Edmonton at the Ramada Inn Water Park, 2 huge waterslides and Smitty's onsite. We were sick of Smitty's but we had a blast on the waterslides. Even Josiah and I got in on the fun. Our last night in a hotel, I think Art and I were both pretty happy about that. We left the hotel after breakfast (from Tim's not Smitty's) and headed downtown. We went looking for Ikea first but for some strange reason we couldn't find it. We thought we remembered where it was but unless it moved we were both mistaken. Art dropped Hannah and I off on Whyte Ave and he and Josiah went to look at a van. I was heading for Gravity Pope, which just happens to be the best shoe store in the country! Edmontonians should all be the best shod people in the land as far as I'm concerned. Hannah got a very funky pair of shoes and I bought a sensible pair of Dansko's. Art picked us up an hour later and we were on the road again, our final leg of the journey. We were headed for Highway #63 or as we've renamed it, Yahoo Highway. That's because, as Art says, every yahoo in western Canada is on it heading for The Fort. If the Icefields Parkway is the most beautiful drive in the world, the #63 is the most boring, not to mention dangerous. The drive is so boring because there is really nothing to see. There was a fire up here not too long ago too which all you see for awhile is miles and miles of burnt out timber. The roadway is peppered with memorial crosses of the poor souls who either didn't make it in or for whom it was their last trip out. The other thing which stands out is the lack of rest stops. I had to use the toilet for the better part of an hour and unfortunately there is just way too much traffic to stop on the side of the road. You would have to go deep into the woods not to be seen and may I remind you folks that this is bear country. We passed a tractor trailer in the ditch at one point. And then there are the tractor trailers hauling wide loads, and I mean the widest loads you have ever seen. It's equipment, buildings, pipe, something called pipe rack modules which go into Alberta's oilfields every single day. And the worst thing about the traffic is that people are haulin' ass on this road. No Sunday drivers out here. Days off are over--time to get back to work! We made it back to Barb and Lee's before dark, in fact, we made it in time for Canadian Idol which made Hannah very happy.