Day 16 Jasper & Banff

Day 16 Saturday – CRAZY DAY Drove over 850 miles – poor planning on our part – Did not know it was Canada Day – there was not a single campsite in all of Canada to be found. Luckily we woke up early this day and were on the road by 7:00, reason being – we wanted to spend some quality time in Jasper or Banff, either fishing, hiking or kayaking, we got to the park entrance on the Jasper end and went to pay for the visit and found out there was no camping available except for a field of overflow camping, we decided that did not sound like much fun so we thought we would just drive thru it and find a spot once we got out of the park. No such luck, entered the park around 5:00 pm – left the park around 10:30 – only making a brief stop to visit some falls, and for a quick bologna sandwich. Once we got out of the park it was dark, very dark, we hadn’t experienced the darkness like that since we arrived in Sitka – driving was scary, lots of critter on the road, couldn’t find a place to camp – I wanted to stay in a motel, Matt ended up parking us in the parking lot to the visitors center in I can’t remember where – this was just after midnight. In the morning we awoke to find we were parked next to a church with all of God’s Angels watching over us. Pretty crazy it was. We were only less then 5 hours from home though.

Aaron's self portrait - again - had to take the camera away from him several times on the whole journey as I was worried about a dead battery - there are numerous "Self Portraits" of Aaron. The kids (forgot, I get corrected now when I call them that) were really awesome on the whole trip.

A picture of some lake I tried to get Matt to stop at so I could take a better picture but as you have probably noticed most of my pictures are from the cab of the truck. I was really impressed with the color of the water and how good the reflection was coming off the lake.

Mountains in Banff

I thought this was rather humorous - Banff on one side and Jasper on the other.

Athabasca Falls, one of the two stops we got to make in all of Jasper and Banff. Drive, Drive, Drive, was sort of like the Chevy Chase movie when the saw the Grand Canyon.