Alberta road trip, Post 4: Icefields Parkway

We've just returned today from a wonderful 4 nights in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I have a lot more to get you up to date on before I can start telling you about it! We have also just signed up to pay Google a small annual fee to increase our photo/video storage limit for the blog, as we had reached 100%. Our new limit is 10 times as much as we have used in the last 2 years!!!

On Wednesday, we drove the 340 km from Jasper to Kananaskis... along the 230 km of the Icefields Parkway through Jasper National Park and Banff National Park, and on into Kananaskis Country south of the Rockies. This was an incredible drive with stunning scenery, frequent wildlife sightings, and the opportunity to see places I have been hearing about for years. I had heard about Banff and Lake Louise from my Canadian grade 1 teacher (who will shortly feature on this blog!), and Ben had done most of this drive when he lived in Canada 6 years ago.


The most exciting and memorable moment of the day was definitely our first ever wild bear sighting! As we were driving along a straight stretch of highway, speed limit 90 km/hr, we noticed a brown furry thing in the grass beside the road, just as we passed it. We quickly realised it was a bear, which then started crossing the road, and as Ben turned the car around and drove slowly back towards it, I thrust the camera out of the window and took the following shot:


I got a few other photos as well, but this was the best one as the bear quickly reached the edge of the road. We were very excited to see a bear AND be the first ones on the scene! (The oncoming car in the photo had cameras poking out its windows by the time it got level with us.) Getting this photo actually turned out to be quite a saga, as that evening when I transferred my photos onto my laptop, I discovered that 60 photos from Wednesday morning had disappeared off my camera for an unknown reason. Over the next two days, Ben downloaded and ran photo recovery programs from the Internet until he was eventually able to recover this precious photo and the others as well. Thank goodness for a geeky husband!!! :D

We also saw two more bears - black ones - later on in the day, but these we found because both times we came across a crowd of cars and camera-wielding tourists lining the sides of the road. Yes, this is exactly what all the brochures say NOT to do. But we figured that with only one bear and so many people, chances are we could outrun at least one of the others should it come to that... ;) Kidding!! The bears were both a way back in the trees and seemed completely oblivious to their audience. But our first bear sighting was by far the highlight.


Around the middle of the Icefields Parkway, where Jasper National Park connects up with Banff National Park, is the Columbia Icefield. The icefield has eight glaciers, and the Athabasca Glacier is the one in the photo below (it's the sweep of ice down the middle), as seen from the highway. In summer, tourists can take a tour over it in a "snow coach", a funny-looking raised bus with huge tyres. Ben actually did the tour 6 years ago, but we didn't do it on this trip - just took a couple of photos and drove on. It's a pretty impressive chunk of ice though, even though it's receding! Look for the people and cars at the bottom of the photo below for a sense of scale.


Our main non-driving activity of the day was a short hike up to Bow Summit to see down over Lake Peyto, which Megan and Justin had just done and recommended to us. What a view!!!


We also stopped briefly at Lake Louise, which was quite crowded and we didn't stay long. It was very pretty though! Near the lake we saw a number of relatively tame squirrels and chipmunks, and this was another highlight of the day for me! I had never seen a chipmunk before and I have decided that I love them even more than I love squirrels (which is really saying something). They are only about half the size of a squirrel, with stripes along their bodies, and they are so soooooo adorable!!!!! My photo of a chipmunk is not that great, so if you are keen on sweet tiny creatures, click here to see a really cute photo courtesy of Wikipedia. :)


After lunch at a Mexican cantina in Banff, we reached Kananaskis Country mid-afternoon. We stopped for a while at a pretty lake, and in the late afternoon we checked in to our accommodation for the night, which was... a teepee!!! Yes, we stayed in a large (4-person) "tipi" at Sundance Lodges and Campground near Kananaskis Village - they also have trappers' tents and 2-person tipis, but didn't have the latter available when I booked.


Staying in a tipi was quite fun! It had wooden floorboards, four beds with plastic-coated mattresses (we had our sleeping bags and pillows), a gas lamp, and a kerosene heater. Our tipi was in its own little clearing, a short distance from the neighbouring campsites and surrounded by trees. We were given precise instructions on the precautions to take to ensure bears would not come knocking (i.e. lock food and toiletries in car, NOT in tent - in fact, there was no way to lock or even secure the tent flap!). That night we went to sleep unusually early, slept very soundly, and were not troubled by any bears. :)

CLICK HERE to view our Alberta road trip photos.

UK driving holiday, Part 1: Oxford and Snowdonia

Well, now that I've finished writing about our Europe trip in July, I just have one more holiday to record before I'm up to date!! After we returned from Europe at the end of July, and were staying with Matt and Kat for our last couple of weeks in England before flying back to Australia, we did a 9-day driving holiday to see some parts of the UK we still hadn't been to. It was a lovely trip, but not very "bloggably exciting" - i.e. no travelling companions and no dramas, just lots of nice scenery etc - so I will be far more brief than usual. Also, we've only got two more days in Australia and I want to be up to date by the time we leave! :)

Anyway, first we stayed three nights with Bryce and Nikki D and their two little boys near Oxford. They are Aussies from Perth who have been living in England for about 6 years - we met them at a picnic we went to in June. We had a great time staying with them! We hardly took any photos, except the ones below of us up on White Horse Hill on a rather chilly day. :) The white horse is a figure cut into the side of the chalk hill, dating back to the Bronze Age. We didn't get a chance to take a good distance shot showing the whole thing, but the second photo below shows its head in the foreground (upside down), if that helps you make sense of it! :)



After Oxford, we headed into north Wales for two days of camping in Snowdonia. We had bought a tent for this trip as we intended to camp in the Lake District as well, but we ended up chickening out and so the two nights in Wales were the only time we ever used it! (However, our tent was so cheap that it still worked out cheaper than spending those two nights in a B&B.) The second photo below shows the view from our tent - there were slate quarries on the sides of the hills nearby.



Anyway, it rained the whole time we camped in Wales, and our camping mats were so thin and hard that I actually had bruises on my hips for the rest of the week!! But it was still fun, and the mountainous countryside was absolutely gorgeous. Since I'm trying to keep this brief, I'll leave it up to these photos of Wales to illustrate the point (click on them to enlarge)...



Anyway, we had a very lazy time in Wales, just driving around enjoying the views, exploring little towns, and even spending a few hours reading books in a tiny library near our campground!

And that was the first five days of our driving holiday. :) I'll be back soon to tell you about the rest of the trip - Mansfield (Dotti's place) and the Lake District!

Final Europe trip, Post 3: Fabulous Florence

On Monday we set off from Venice to Florence (Firenze in Italian) in our hire car. We had lunch in some random town along the way, sheltering from the pouring rain and eating delicious pasta dishes that became some of our favourite meals on the trip.

When we reached Florence, where none of us had ever been before, we discovered that our accommodation for the next two nights - a 3-bed house tent at Camping Michelangelo - was on the side of a hill overlooking the beautiful city of Florence, and right next to the Piazzale Michelangelo, where one of the copies of Michelangelo's statue of David is (Florence is home to one other copy and the original). The first photo below shows our house tent and hire car, the second photo shows our campsite from the Piazzale Michelangelo (it's hidden under all the trees), and the third and fourth photos show the view of Florence from the Piazzale, and David.



That evening we wandered around the centre of Florence, an absolutely gorgeous city with lots of bridges, lots of scooters and motorbikes, and lots of elaborate gelati displays (see photos below). We were a little sad to discover that gelati had been much cheaper in Venice though (but we still ate some). We also saw quite a lot of small electric city buses, and even an electric three-wheeled one-seater car charging in a carpark (yellow one in photo below)!



There was a square in the city centre where there were a lot of statues, including the other copy of David and a Neptune. We think this was outside the museum where the real David is, which we didn't see. In another part of the city, across from the river in what we've just discovered was the courtyard between the Uffizi Gallery's two wings (thanks Wikipedia!), Ben was quite excited to find a statue of Machiavelli.



One of the things we loved about Florence was the Ponte Vecchio (meaning "old bridge" in Italian). This is a bridge with shops along both sides of it (mostly jewellers, souvenir shops and art dealers these days), and from the outside you can see that the shops jut out from the base of the bridge a little, and are supported by steel rods. Here are some photos of the bridge from various angles (the last photo is of the sunset as seen from the Ponte Vecchio this first night)...



We crossed the bridge a few times that night and the next day, and on this first night the centre of the bridge was occupied by a guitar-playing busker who had quite a sizeable audience gathered on both sides of the bridge, enjoying his songs and taking photos of the magnificent sunset. There is a gap in the shops on both sides of the bridge at the centre, making for a lovely view of the river in both directions, and a brilliant spot for a concert!! We listened to him for a while and bought his CD. Check out the photos and video below!

That night we had scrumptious pizzas for tea, and experimented with various camera settings to get some night shots of Florence on our way back up the hill to Camping Michelangelo. Check out the awesome night view from the Piazzale Michelangelo (fifth photo below)...



I think I've unintentionally toned down my raving about places in blog entries over the last year :P, but Florence is truly beautiful... interesting architecture, lots of culture, great shopping, wonderful food, and friendly locals. On one of our nights in Florence, a very old and small Italian lady, who spoke only a little English, saw Ben lift me down from a wall and stopped to call him a gentleman and wish us a nice holiday. :) Florence was the perfect place to visit in between seeing Venice and Pisa (our next destination), which are both very comercialised and feel as though they would be almost empty if all the tourists were to disappear.

Anyway, I was going to write about the next day now as well, but this entry is already quite long, so more next time! :) Bye for now!