Canada and Alaska 2024

Episode 4, Week Three, June 7-10

Our move from Spokane into Canada could not have been any smoother or easier. The border crossing took us only about two minutes and was very pleasant. We were asked a few pretty easy and straight forward questions. They wanted to know where we were from, where we were going, how long we were staying in Canada, and where were we staying that night. They also included the obligatory “Do you have any weapons?”, being that we were coming from Texas.

On our way to the border, we heard that the border agents were scheduled to go on strike about two hours before our arrival. While the agents were not permitted to walk off of the job, they would have been able to really slow everything down to a crawl. Luckily for us, they postponed the strike for another few days while negotiations continued, and we were able to get through very easily.

We started off this week with an overnight stop at Moyie Lake Provincial Park near Cranbrook, British Columbia. This was not our original “destination” for the evening as we were planning on boondocking in Cranbrook, but decided to stop at the provincial park and see if there was anything available. Being that it was a Friday evening, we weren’t sure whether there would be any sites, but were surprised to find that they had a number of first come, first serve site.

Heading towards Calgary, Alberta, we made our first Canadian fuel stop in Cranbrook. The price was $1.799 CDN per liter, which equated to $4.975 USD per gallon. That’s quite a bit more than we were paying in the US. Our stop ended up being just a short drive from the west side of Calgary, but gave us easy access to the city. We arrived early and decided to find a place for dinner. Almost every restaurant was booked and not taking reservations. We did eventually find one sports oriented restaurant that managed to get us in. That’s when we discovered why there was so little availability. It was the first night of the NHL playoff finals and nearby Edmonton was playing. We did have some good food and the atmosphere was electric with almost every television in the place tuned to the game, until the Oilers fell behind, eventually losing game one. Check out that cool silverware.

On our first full day in the Calgary area, we drove downtown and started the day with a trip up into the Calgary Tower. The views from there were something to see, and standing on a section of glass floor was a bit challenging from some of our party. From the tower, we walked over to the Peace Bridge, which crossed over the Bow River and is part of a nice park along the river. The design is very unique in that it required no support other than the anchors on each end. After walking back through the Chinatown area of downtown, we found a restaurant with a rooftop patio with a view of the Calgary Tower.

Monday morning was an early start as I had an appointment for an oil and filter change just up the road at the Ford dealer in Cochrane. Everything went smoothly, the price was reasonable, and I was back to pick up Debbie and Ashley by 9:00 a.m. We went to the Olympic Park area and started the day off with several runs on a downhill carting path. After riding a ski-lift to the top of the run, the ride down was exciting and we felt as if we were going much faster than we actually were. On one of our runs, we did see a boy lose control a bit and leave the track. Fortunately, he didn’t crash or get injured in any way. Unfortunately for us, most of the rest of the olympic park was closed, although we did get our picture sitting in the Jamaican bobsled used in the making of the movie Cool Runnings.

Since it was still fairly early in the day, we decided to take a drive west through Kananaskis Country, which contains several provincial parks. These were our first really closeup views of snow-covered mountains. Other than driving for the views, we had a hike to suspension bridge as our ultimate goal. Along the way, we saw a number of Rocky Mountain sheep, which seemed to like to stand in the middle of the road, and even one grizzly bear. Once to our destination, it was a short hike up to the Black Shale suspension bridge. Of course, just as we got to the bridge, it started to rain. We didn’t let that stop us though. On our way back down from the bridge hike, the weather cleared and we were able to have a great dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Canmore before walking around the town.

Our next stop is at the Lake Louise Hard-sided Campground in Banff National Park. It’s so named because you must have a hard-sided camper because of the bears in the area. There’s much to see and do there, so expect that post later this week.