Banff & Lake Louise

By virtue of the fact that I have been posting this week, and that there were no reports of major plane crashes on CNN last weekend, you have probably gathered that we survived the trip and Liam still has his parents. We had a fabulous time last weekend at Lake Louise. It was pouring rain and about three degrees when I got into Calgary on Thursday night, and when we woke up Friday morning the TransCanada Highway to Banff was closed on account of the snow. Luckily it didn't take them long to clear it and we left Calgary on Friday afternoon after Chad's course finished. As for me, I spent the day sleeping in, paddling around the hotel's pool, and shopping in the maze of Calgary malls that line the Plus 15 walkway. Not only do they keep you out of the cold... they also keep you dry.We only stayed at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise because we got a 2-nights-for-the-price-of-1 deal through Expedia. The hotel is insanely expensive (my true cheapskate tendencies come out). The funny thing is that we booked into the bare bones room - it was supposed to be a view of the parking lot - instead, this is what we got. Dead centre on the water, top floor. Hee hee.It came at a price though. We basically had bad service all weekend (starting when we checked in and they offered us a room with 2 twin beds - not exactly what we had in mind - though that did get rectified) so we blamed it on the fact that they knew we were the Expedia people who somehow got a free room upgrade and deserved the worst of the worst in every other way.
The idea behind staying at the hotel (besides always having wanted to try one of the old CP Railway hotels) was to do some hiking; there are trails that start right outside the hotel's back door. It snowed Friday night as we arrived at the hotel and was still overcast on Saturday morning, but at least we stayed dry as we hiked to the Plain of Six Glaciers. The trail first skirts the lake... here we are at the far end of it......then we started climbing into the mountains. You can still see the lake and a smudge of the hotel behind me. There's a tea house at the top of the trail where we stopped for some hot chocolate. It was a well deserved treat because we were the first ones up to the tea house that morning and had to break the trail through the snow ourselves.
Normally at this time of year in Banff/Lake Louise it is fall - it's colder than it would be at home, but the snow was still somewhat unexpected. Typically the area would just be bursting with fall colours right now - the snow is a bonus I guess.
Another view outside our hotel room window. For our anniverary dinner (still in Calgary) we had an amazing dinner - I had a big steak with jumbo shrimp, lobster butter and tarragon bearnaise sauce and smoked gruyere mashed potatoes - oh my, it was good. Like I said before... it was soup and salad for the rest of the weekend. :) Not too much else to report... lots of hiking... we spotted one elk, three mountain goats and also saw an avalanche in person (they sound exactly like thunder and my first thought, as we were 2.5 hours from the hotel at that point, was crap - we are going to get soaked.) Westjet now offers seatback TVs on its long haul flights so we were able to catch the season premiere of the Amazing Race on our trip back home, which made the time fly. We came home with a souvenir Christmas tree ornament, a t-shirt for Liam, and a stuffed animal for #2 who accompanied us - something by which to remember his/her first travelling adventure.