Saturday: July 17, 1999

The 1st day of week two finds us awakening to the sound of buguling elk in our back yard. A fitting farewell to Jasper. All aboard the Astro Express and we're headed South along the ice fields parkway (route 93).

At this point I must pause to say a word about the remainder of the scenery on this trip. Until now, I thought that while I may see vistas of similar beauty and majesty, I could never see anything which exceeded my experiences to date. I was wrong! Somewhere along this parkway, I came face to face with the visual overload of God's creative efforts. If God has graced this planet with so much beauty, what must Heaven be like? I cannot describe this absolute perfection, so I will not try. Not here. Not in Banff. Not at Lake Louise. Not at Mt. Rainier. From this point on, all that I can record is what we did.

And what did we do? We walked on the Athabasca glacier at the Columbia Ice Fields. We drank of the pure glacier water. We watched X-treemly crazy kyakers above Mistaya Canyon and falls. We saw the perfect tourquise of Bow Summit and Peyto Lake. We walked sheepishly into the Banff Springs Hotel. And just as sheepishly, we hurried out (we didn't want to intimidate the guests with our aristocratic airs). Finally, we ate pub grub at a noisy eatery called The Rose 'n Crown (unanamously hailed as the best eats of the trip).

Banff Springs Hotel? Not for us. When in Banff, one must go first class, thus we secured lodging at a resort complex of condaminums. What an amazing place... once we found a parking slot. The stairs to our front door were not too terribly intimidating. And the towel provided for the 5 of us was quite fluffy. Too bad there weren't any more. Each of the 2 closets (I mean bedrooms) sported a bed. A place for the suitcases would have been a nice touch. According to the posted procedures, soiled towels (assuming you had more than 1) were to be placed in the bathtub to be replaced daily by the maid service. I'm sure our towel was replaced. After all, the guidelines didn't say that they would be replaced with clean towels.

That evening, during a frustrating stint at our "resort's" laundry (4 machines to service over 100 condiminums), we learned that Uncle Tom had passed away, the victim of a heart attack.

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