Banff to Strathmore ~Bye, Bye Canadian Rockies!



Lake Moraine ~ Perfect!

Our last day in the Canadian Rockies… it leaves me a little sad. The mountains are such a unique place to get close to nature. You can walk around see the diversity in every direction. I don’t think you can do that in the Great Plains that will be our temporary home in the upcoming week or so.



I needed to get a few pictures this morning of early sun hitting Moraine Lake and that was our first destination. I’ve never been to this lake and it was worth the 8 mile drive up the paved mountain road. We weren’t the first to arrive, but we did beat the multitude of Japanese on tour buses. Lake Moraine sits behind a large rock moraine left by the receding glacier. We hiked up to the top of the moraine for that elusive shot of the lake with the sun hitting the glacier in the back ground. We were a couple of hundred feet above the lake and the sun did its thing with light. Perfect! The next stop was to go back to Lake Louise… we were there late in the day yesterday. But, the sun was not in the right place to light the lake. This morning it was sunny, but still not the angle of choice. You can’t win them all!

Rocky Mountain High!

Onward to Banff the best town with Tyrolean Architecture with  flowers everywhere! We spent the rest of the morning here walking around.  We drove up to the hot springs to dip our toes into the hot water.  A few more pictures and that was the last vivid memory of the Rockies. In about an hour or so the land became very flat and the mountains were only visible in your rear view mirror.

Everybody Does One of These Shots!

Calgary a city of over 100,000 people…As we approached the byways and heavy traffic, we elected to push on past this large city. We stopped in Chestermere a suburb of Calgary. It was one of those new communities with all the new store outlets. The Safeway grocery store had a Starbucks coffee shop which meant “Free WiFi”. We did groceries and got caught up on email and the blogs. We couldn’t stay there for the night so we drove another half hour to Strathmore. We had stayed here in 2005 at a motel and it was a good spot to bed down for the night.



Banff ~Style!

That is what we saw and did