Day 9 - Canmore, AB to Hinton, AB

Wow! That is all I can say. The pictures won’t do it justice – and there will be LOTS and LOTS of pictures posted – but today’s ride was just an amazing amount of scenery to take in.

After a quick coffee at the Timmie’s next door to the hotel, we met up with Joe and Romy and headed out in coolish (under 5C) temps, but with clear skies. After a short jaunt to Banff – they were getting ready for a POW WOW today, so we didn’t stay long, but did make a short detour to the Fairmont Banff Springs to deliver a wallet that Brian had found on the ground in downtown that belonged a staff member there – we stopped into Lake Louise, which at 9:30 in the morning was already filled with people. Thank goodness we were on bikes, because they let us park right at the Lake (and we got the family parking discount too!).

From there, it was on to the Icefields Parkway and its' magnificent views and scenery – if we were to have stopped at every one of the viewpoints, we’d still be on that road tomorrow! They weren’t allowing people down to Moraine Lake, so we missed out on that, and at Peyto Lake, there was absolutely no parking available either, so we didn’t get to see it.

We did see Crowfoot and Athabasca Glaciers, and after a stop for a light (but rather expensive - $13 sandwich) lunch, we continued on up to Athabasca Falls, where Jana met up with her second “daughter” Sara and her dog Olive, for a brief visit. I had thought about going up to Mt Edit Cavell, but since they had received 25 cms of snow on the Parkway just a couple of days ago, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

So, off to Jasper we went and after fueling up, we made our way on the Yellowhead Highway to the Pines Motel in Hinton, our home for the night. When I pulled up, I thought that perhaps the motel had been torn down, but as it turns out, it was the restaurant next door that was torn to the ground. So, we decided to walk down the road to

the Boston Pizza for our dinner.

Wildlife sightings today: 2 moose, 1 elk, half a dozen whitetail deer, goats, sheep, a couple of HUGE crows and one kamikaze bird (species unknown) that didn't fare very well when it ran into my fairing.

For the day, we logged just under 414 kms, bringing the total for the trip to 4,785 kms. Today was also a HUGE picture quantity day - between the camera mounted on the bike and the cameras that Vicki and Jana used, we had almost 1,000 pictures plus a bunch of videos taken!