I stopped for gas in a town called Canmore, at the edge of Banff national park. The gas station attendant recommended me to a great coffee shop in town, where I wrote yesterday's events here on the ol' blog. Met a nice young woman named Katrina who helped me find a few answers, but mostly posed questions of her own...we both agreed Canada's too big of a country to properly distill a lot of the things I wanted to know down to specifics. It was a good talk.
The next town over was Banff itself - but even before i'd arrived in Banff...I saw the rockies creep up on the horizon. Very suddenly, everything changed.
There's nothing quite like driving through the mountains. This by far has been the most incredible part of the drive. Everyone talks about the Rockies, and how driving through them is so unbelievable, but until you're actually in the shadow of these massive peaks it's hard to understand why. The photos really don't do them justice. There's such a sense of...presence in these mountains. These huge stone entities look down at you with the wisdom of millions of years and you feel very...small. They're like huge, impassive professors...too jaded to impart their wisdom. They experience time on such a different level from us it's hard to relate to them in a personal sense. A moment to them is a lifetime to us.
The other odd thing is that driving through the rockies becomes like a video game. The road is up, down, around, over, 10% incline, straight up, hairpin turn, and there are signs that come at you every two seconds: Mountain Goats, next 3 km. Moose, next 5 km. Squiggly line, next 15km. It feels like graphics in a video game flying at you as you whizz along these crazy roads. I would not want to drive these in the winter. Anywhere you are, there's an 800 foot drop on one side of you. It's wild.
In Banff, I drove up the side of one mountain in particular, and ran into this guy:
A goat.
He was the most relaxed goat i've ever seen. But the downside of Banff is that it is absolutely crawling with tourists. I started to feel quite conscious of the camera around my neck as the hills around me were seething with Dads wielding DSLR's and I couldn't even get angry with them. I'm the guy with the camera so I can't be upset with that....but when you're surrounded by 11 people all trying to get the same photo of a goat...the experience feels...cheapened. I had a look at the mountains in a quieter spot, and then left for Lake Louise.
It occurred to me as I drove to Lake Louise that it's going to be even more touristy than Banff...I decided to take a different approach, and see if I could get the perspective of someone who isn't from Canada, to field some of my questions. I met these two doctors from South Africa who'd been living in Vancouver for the last nine months - they were taking their family around to see what Canada was all about. I had the most amazing interview with the two of them in front of beautiful Lake Moraine (a neighbour to Lake Louise).
The rest of the day was mostly made of driving. Calgary to Vancouver is a lot of kilometres, and I had a ferry to catch the next morning. I did have a brief pause in Revelstoke to fuel up, and while I was there, a strange thing happened.
It started to snow...
Not hard, but a little. It was swirling in the air, and landing on the windshield. I was standing outside, dumbfounded, trying to capture some on video. Very quickly, the snow became rain, and quite a lot of rain very suddenly. I hopped back in my car. Snow in July in Canada...definitely a new experience for me.
I'd texted Alex Hogg (who i'll be staying with in Vancouver) to let him know I was about to arrive. He'd said all was well. I pulled into Vancouver at around 12:30, and called to let him know I was there...but got no response. Tried text messaging, no response... made 9 phone calls...no response. Oh dear. He was definitely asleep. I went to try the door, but there were two mailboxes on the house, neither bearing his name. There was a unit A and a unit B, and the mailboxes with their names didn't correspond to either. I didn't want to barge in on some stranger in the middle of the night. So I resigned myself to sleeping in the car. After coming all this way, only to fall short by fifteen feet was frustrating...but not nearly as frustrating as realizing that in order to sleep in my car, I had to unload Alex's winter tires. Alas.
1:30 and I finally pulled my sweater over me like a blanket, and got some semblance of sleep. Early day tomorrow, and many ferries to ride.
Onward!
-Jeff
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