Jasper National Park

Spring break!!!

This is our last free week of the tour and we are already off to a good start. We left before the sun was up this morning for Banff, Alberta, aka Canada's first (and potentially greatest) national park.

What better way of getting to a National Park than by driving through another? Because you get to Banff by driving through Jasper National Park. We drove the Icefields Parkway, which has been called one of the world's most beautiful highways. It looked like something out of Twilight and we would know since our friends had a residency in Forks, Washington. It was actually pretty unreal, except that it was entirely real.

Now, Sweeney basically became our little red airplane today as we reached an elevation of nearly 7,000ft. Yup, we were mile high and more today! During training, they had warned us that driving up into the mountains could lead to unpredictable weather and boy, we saw it all today. Sunshine all morning up until the second we entered the park, when the got splatted with some rain, and then lots of snow at the highest peaks! The snow kept us from going out to see any actual glaciers or getting any decent pictures of the icefields but imagine flat and wide and where there should be grass, there is snow... Ok, that just sounds like Boston this winter, so include a few majestic mountains in that mental picture and your wildest dreams still won't be enough.

Driving through in winter means combating the snow like I mentioned above and it also means that a few prime destinations are closed for the season but we were able to stop for a photo op at Athabasca Falls.

We made it to our hostel early in the afternoon and had time to explore a bit of Banff, which meant dinner and you guessed it, ice cream! We went to Cow's, which is "Canada's Ice Cream" and I didn't get a milkshake, but I will before we leave. They had lots of shirts and stuff to buy besides ice cream but I seriously wonder about copyright laws up here because you think someone would have an issue with "Orange is the MOO black," "50 Shades of Hay," and "Moonions" shirts (among others). It definitely isn't Banff's only place to get sweet treats though and I will have to do a lot of taste testing before our week here is over. And now, I am going to catch up on some sleep so that I can have more adventures tomorrow!