Road and Rail in British Columbia and Alberta

The world will descend upon Vancouver, British Columbia, and nearby Whistler, BC, for the 2010 Winter Olympics. If you are traveling to this wonderful area, you should consider extending your trip with a combination rental car and overnight train trip offered by the Canadian rail system VIA. You'll be able to escape the crowds and enjoy some tremendous scenery and activities, summer or winter.

My wife and I enjoyed this package in June 2009 beginning with an early Sunday morning rental car pick up from a Vancouver agency of our choosing and our only requirement to check in to a small inn in Lac le Jeune, British Columbia, for the night. With a 'time-distance' map check behind us, we decided to spend some of our day visiting one of the several wineries and farmers markets in the Fraser River Valley just east of Vancouver. Enroute we first made the obligatory stop to pick up survival snacks and soft drinks and found everything we needed in a Canadian Superstore, one of the largest stores I've ever seen and dwarfing a SuperWalmart. We concluded prices were a bit higher than in the U.S. when the exchange rate was $1.12 Canadian to $1 U.S.

We reached Lac le Jeune in midafternoon for our first night so we decided to drive into Kamloops to experience a mid-sized Canadian town on a Sunday afternoon. We were not disappointed. We strolled around the city's Riverside Park where the Big and Little Thompson Rivers merge and watched families' enjoying the sun, water, games, and food. We were struck by a memorial marking the high points of several past floods ..... one of the marks about 10 feet above the level of the park.

We drove into the hills over Kamloops to the Lac le Jeune Inn and before dinner my wife and I took a brief walk around the lake, enjoying the unique private cabins along the shore. We watched trout in a small stream within thirty yards of the inn fight to swim upstream to spawn. The trout pushed and shoved each other until they were ready for a run through stretches of very shallow water. Our evening ended with a fantastic dinner buffet of prime rib and ham with side dishes and wonderful desserts.

Early after sunrise the next morning I had a short walk around the lake and observed a small pontoon boat returning photographers with their giant lenses to the inn. They had obviously gotten up very early to catch the first light on the lake and its wildlife as they began to move. They certainly seemed a happy group as they returned to the inn.

As we drove along the Eagel River we encountered beautiful little town after town of marinas, beaches, inns, and B&Bs. For example, Shusway claimed the title of 'Houseboat Capital of Canada' and had the upper half of a houseboat implanted along the road as a 'welcome' to town. The number of houseboats we had seen on the river that morning certainly seemed to justify the claim. As always, we look for opportunities to experience local wines so we stopped at the Granite Creek winery in Tappen and my wife, the expert, approved their product after a little tasting and we left with a bottle of wine for the remainder of our trip. The owners were very proud to point out their winery is the 'northernmost in North America'. The last point of interest before our arrival in Banff was Carigellaiche, the site 50kms southwest of Revelstoke where the final railroad spike connecting eastern and western Canada was driven in 1885. It remains to this day a very beautiful but rugged and isolated area.

Banff National Park is one of four contiguous national parks ..... Banff, Kootenay, Yoho, and Jasper ...... totaling 7600 sq miles, a UNESCO site and a truly huge area almost the size of New Jersey. Banff is a international tourist draw and its streets along the Bow River were filled with people from around the world and one hears many languages along the street. Our package put us in the Mount Royal Hotel, the town's original hotel right in the center of town with a view of the main street, Banff Avenue. Banff's streets were lined with boutiques, sports gear stores, and restaurants as we enjoyed an afternoon stroll of discovery, including a few blocks here and there into residential areas.

We enjoyed breakfast the next morning in Melissa's, a place obviously popular with tourists and residents alike as exemplified by the three Royal Canadian Mounties who dined a few feet from us. Dressed in functional dark gray uniforms rather than their ceremonial scarlet, nonetheless, the two male and one female Mounties were an impressive lot and certainly ensured my law abiding!

Our full day in Banff was a busy one. We first used our included vouchers for a gondola ride to the top of Mt. Sulphur for a panoramic view of the valleys and rivers below. Three mountain goats grazed near the gondola terminal under the scrutiny of many camera-packing tourists like ourselves. The gondola ride each way was 8 minutes while a young woman who walked the trail up the mountain told us it took 1 ¾ hours and she was very glad when she reached the top! After descending the mountain, we visited the Banff Springs Fairmont Hotel, one of the most famous and beautiful hotels in the world. Like its sister in Lake Louise, this hotel was built in the late 1880s to resemble the style of the contemporaneous great spas of Europe to draw visitors to Canada's Rocky Mountains. The hotel was absolutely gorgeous with massive wooden staircases and a fully wood paneled lobby. Clearly out of our price range but we enjoyed its interior and a walk around its grounds, including a look at the impressive Bow River Falls and what has to be one of the most impressive golf courses in the world. A slice from a tee here and one's ball will find its way to a faraway ocean!

We concluded our day using our tour's voucher for a soak in the Banff Upper Hot Springs on a hillside just above Banff. The hot springs is operated similarly to a European spa today.... but swimsuits are required. After changing clothes and showering in separate locker rooms, men and women meet in a large pool of 102 F mineral water. Under the lifeguard's watchful eye, soakers chat while enjoying the therapeutic 'cure'. I may not have been the youngest nor the most 'buff' but I was the most 'Arizona tanned'. In any case, the soak certainly prepares one for a nap before dinner!

The following morning we continued our trip enroute Jasper with stops at Lake Louise and the Columbia Icefield. The Fairmont Hotel at Lake Louise is another famous and gorgeous hotel built more than a hundred years ago to attract the 'well to do'. The hotel is positioned on the side of a lake of glacial runoff. The glacier's grinding of rock over the centuries fills the lake with rock 'powder' suspended in the water, giving it a very light turquoise hue. This suspended powder heightens the reflective nature of the water, offering the remarkable mirror images of the mountains and hotel for which the lake is famous. We walked around the lake for a short distance on a cloudy morning in a light rain yet were amazed by the tremendous reflections. Swiss mountain guides were brought to Lake Louise in the late 1880s to guide the hotel's guests into the mountains and its bellhops today dress as Swiss guides of that era, including heavy climbing boots. The hotel was, of course, just as dramatic as is sister in Banff and, as we were to learn in a different part of our trip to Canada, another Fairmont Hotel in the 2010 Olympics village of Whistler.

The Columbia Icefield is located about 65 miles northwest of Lake Louise. It is a series of ice flows from a glacier covering 130 sq miles onto which visitors can ride large, especially designed vehicles onto a glacier 1,000 feet in depth. Twenty two of these vehicles exist, 21 at Columbia Icefield and one in Antarctica. It was great fun to walk on the ice and even to scoop a bit of 'fresh' glacial water for a sip. Remarkably, the melting waters of the glacier are 'tri-divide' .... some flows to the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans!

Finishing the day, we prepared for our stop in small Jasper, Alberta. The town may be small but it's a jumping off point for skiing in winter and guided horseback riding, hiking, gondola rides to mountain peaks, hot springs, and the Icefield. The most interesting area of Jasper is the approximately 6 square blocks of parallel Connaught and Patricia streets, filled with restaurants, bars, shops, and places where activities can be arranged ... a remarkable number of options for such a small town.

My wife and I enjoyed a walk along a developed trail overlooking the town, stopping often to photograph the wonderful views of snowcapped mountains. We also had the unexpected opportunity as we began the walk to step into the Anglican Church of St. Mary and St. George visited in 2005 by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. A photograph album at the back of this beautiful little church proudly chronicled the visit.

The town's 'proximity' to nature was demonstrated by the 'bear proof' trash receptacles around town .... seen everywhere along our trip ... and the wire with colored strips of tape strung about six feet high around yards and gardens. We learned these are to keep elk away!

The following day we turned in our rental car across the street from the train station, had lunch in town, and waited for our westbound, cross Canada VIA passenger train .... and it was three hours late! Despite the bad start, we had a great time on the train and made up the lost time overnight enroute Vancouver. We sat in an observation car with fellow Canadian and Swiss passengers talking and enjoying the scenery and free champagne and snacks. Train personnel alerted us when we were about to pass wildlife so we jumped to windows on the specified of the train to see a Brown bear and, on another occasion, a large male elk with quite an impressive set of antlers. One of the Canadian ladies was a little girl in Normandy on D-Day and shared memories of German and American soldiers and 'bombs'. We were called for the late dinner seating and shared it with this same couple who lived north of Montreal. A great dinner, too.

After dinner, our long day demanded 'to bed' and we had 2 bunks in a 4 bunk compartment, sharing with a woman traveling alone who was quite experienced in travel on this route so she was able to explain many things to us. The car's steward had already converted the cabin's bench seats into the 4 bunks so we missed that operation. Of course, we had to use the toilet at the end of the car and I was puzzled for a while, trying to figure how to flush it. Adjacent to the toilet in a separate compartment was a great shower, too.

After a sleep in the rocking compartment behind heavy curtains, I arose early and dressed while lying flat on my back in my compartment. I had to watch the countryside pass by in the early morning. It was great fun to watch the train pass through small towns as they awakened, walkers and those on their way to work waving as we rumbled past. The Fraser River was always on one side or the other and there were many boats and fishermen about.

Finally, we arrived in Vancouver's Pacific Central Station and our tour of southern British Columbia and western Alberta was over. What a great time and what a great country to our north, one of beauty and the friendliest people imaginable.