Day 1

We left for the 6:20 ferry. Bye Bye Nanaimo, see you again next summer!

 So driving along, 15 minutes off the ferry, we hear a loud crack, if you look near the left of the picture you can see the little chip a rock made in the windshield. What a wonderful start to our trip.

Here are some of the first views of the mountain range.

We took these while waiting for over an hour in traffic.. why?? Construction on a Saturday morning!

This picture was taken around Salmon Arms. the mountains changed to a dull sand colour.

Ethan says; "This is why I had to change from Credit Union"

Getting even closer to the mountain range. Look! There's snow on the mountain.

We are now in the mountains driving through, this is what we see all around us. The average elevation was approximately 1300 meters.  Ears blocked quite a few times.

As we were driving a sign told us that smoke was detected 10km further in the mountain. Upon arriving at that location, this is what we saw.  Seemed like the fire had been put out recently.

Our attempt at taking a picture of ourselves with mountains in the back. Unfortunately the focus blurs them out.

Passing through one real tunnel, and about 5 fake tunnels. They are built to protect cars from the avalanches.

More mountains!

This is Spiral Tunnels.  If you look closely you can see two trains, one higher than the other travelling in opposite directions.  However. This is the SAME train! It spirals inside the mountain to get higher, as it can only go up 2% at a time.  The train is about a mile long.  Really cool thing to see.  (This is also the location were Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger movie was filmed.)

Further up the street, heading towards one of Canada's tallest waterfalls, we found this sign.

Followed by this road. You had to be extremely careful of oncoming cars as each turn was 180 degrees.

Here is the waterfall from far.  Takakkaw falls (or something like that)

More waterfall photos.

Waterfall turning into a stream. The stream was pure white and EXTREMELY COLD!  This waterfall is from a glacier.

Us with the waterfall!

The creek from the waterfall. Pretty scenery!

A Nice shot of forest, mountains, and look! The Moon!

More scenery as dusk is setting in.

Almost night time! We forgot that the time changed, and were now an hour later.

Snowy mountain top with moon in background (This is on the road towards Lake Louise.)

We are at Lake Louise!

Lake Louise

Lake Louise

Close up of Lake Louise mountain.

We arrived at Banff in darkness. Unfortunately, ALL Hotels were fully booked, so off we were to the next town, which was also fully booked.. Finally after making it to Calgary at midnight we found two hotels with a room. One had an executive suite for 200$ the other only the honeymoon suite for 300$  :S  What bad luck..   We went for the 200$ asked for a discount due to the late arrival, we managed to get it for 169$. 

Off to Day 2, (going to see a Dinosaur Museum)