Canada

Well, we are finally here!  Canada is soooo incredibly pretty.  I can see why Austin was so excited to show me this place.  We left Friday afternoon and drove all through the night.  The ride really wasn’t bad…even though it was 16 hours.  Kylie did remarkably well.  I owe most of our sanity to Spongebob Squarepants.  My mom got her this Spongebob doll for her birthday and it came with one episode (which is 15 min), and I bet she watched that episode like 15 times. 

When we got to the border, I really thought it would be a lot scarier.  I envisioned all these men with guns and big flashlights that they would flash in your eyes.  But when we got there, there was just one woman…no gun and no flashlight :)  Oh well.  We got to Canmore where our condo was at like 8:30 in the morning.  Our condo is so stinkin cool. Here are a few pics.

Our bedroom

The living room/dining room/kitchen area

Since all of us were sleep deprived, we all took a nap and then we headed out to Banff.  The town is so cool looking.  They have all these neat shops too.  The two stores I was most excited to go in was the Christmas store and the Lush store.  I got a couple of cute things at the Christmas store, and at the Lush store, I went a bit wild.  The Lush store is all this homemade beauty/skin/hair products.  I mainly wanted to get some bath bombs.  I got like 6 of those and some massage bars.  I was in heaven :)

The next day we went on our first hikes.  It was such a beautiful day (unlike today and yesterday where it’s been raining almost nonstop) and I loved being out in the mountains.  Our first stop was to  Moraine  Lake.  It was beautiful.  Here are a few pics.

Next we took a hike out to Consolation Lake.  I really enjoyed that hike.  You end up at the lake, which is surrounded by all these big rocks.  Little chipmunks or whatever they were were running around everywhere trying to get free handouts.  One of the little critters ran off with this little toy Kylie had.  After he found out it wasn’t food, he quickly discarded it :) 

After that hike, we headed over to the Chateau Lake Louise Hotel.  It sits on this beautiful lake.  We spent about an hour there enjoying the scenery.

On Monday we went to  Crowfoot Glacier. 

We went to this souvenir shop at Bow Lake and got a couple of goodies.  It was raining really hard.  Here is Kylie with her little poncho.

Here is Peyto Lake.  I really wish the camera could have captured the color of this lake.  It was kind of an aqua color.  If anyone has been to Bear Lake, that’s kind of what it looked like.  It was so pretty.

Then we went up to Mistaya Canyon. It was this really cool area where a huge river goes through a very tight canyon. It was really awesome.

Here we are at Bow Lake.  Kylie had a lot of fun throwing rocks in the water.  She didn’t like it when the rocks stuck to her hand though :)

We’ve been going down the Parkway, which is where you will more than likely see wildlife, and so far all we have seen is one black bear.  Well, on our way home yesterday, Austin spotted this grizzly off the side of the road.  I know the bars look misleading, but this bear really is in the wild!  They just have the fence up so the bears and other wild animals won’t go on the freeway.  Anyway, he was really cool to see.

Today kind of sucked because we were heading out to go hiking and Austin’s mom and dad’s pulley dropped out of the car onto the highway.  So they had to tow their car back to Canmore.  It has been raining violently so I guess it was a good thing that we had to stick around the condo for like 5 hours.  We are hoping to back to go back to Banff tonight and do some more shopping.  I certainly hope we get out of here soon, I’m going crazy!!!!  Until next time…