Day 4 to 6 Disney/Alaska Adventure

I wasn't going to post this yet but after looking through all of the pictures, I thought I better so that the blog doesn't get too long.

Day 4 was going to be a stressful day. Why you ask? Because we had to cross the Canadian border. If you look at the news, it is easier to cross the Mexican border than to cross the Canadian border. Why? Again you ask. Because they stop you and want to know why you are entering Canada. We should move the Canadian border to Mexico.

Anyways, back to us. We left Shelby, MT early. Lisa was having a stressful time with all of the what ifs. Like, what if they take our vegetables? What if they take our meat? What if they take our bear spray? What if they take my pocket knife? What about our money? What about the cats? My answer to all of that. We will buy more. Period. Except for the cats.

We made it through the border easily. The agent asked the standard questions and let us go on our merry way. 3 minutes max. First stop was the Alberta Visitor Center. We got some great information from Grace who worked there and she really just planned our drive for us. While Gladys and Grace were chatting, I was battling a T-rex.

It was a good thing they didn't confiscate my knife. I had him skinned and quartered in no time. 

Grace gave us some great information on some shortcuts and a very scenic way around Calgary. She had us going through the foothills and it was a very nice drive. We found our next stop easily. Ghost Lake Reservoir Recreation Area just outside of Cochrane, Alberta. West of Calgary. It is a Provincial Park. The problem I have is that it was 26 dollars Canadian for a picnic table and firepit. We just paid 6 dollars a night at Buffalo Gap for the same thing. The question I have is 26 dollars cheap for Canada? Inquiring minds want to know. 

Spot 18.

That's us way down there in those trees in the center..

Ghost Lake.

So moral is high with the crew. Rum rations will continue. Next stop will be Jasper National Park along the Icefields Parkway.

Day 5. We can't believe it is only day 5. It seems like forever since we left. We left the foothills and headed to Banff, Alberta. We stopped at the visitor center there and purchased our 40.00 dollar park passes for Jasper National Park. The drive itself is very beautiful and the nice thing about this road is, is that there is no commercial traffic. Just cars and RV's. Lots of RV's. I have never seen so many rental RV's in one place in my life.

I guess that $40.00 is okay when you think about the views you see along the way. If you have never taken this drive, you should plan a trip to see this. It is nothing but spectacular. Remember that you can click on the photo to enlarge it and see it in greater detail. We did make a few stops to just take in this beautiful scenery. One of those stops was at the Athabasca Glacier.

Here you can buy a ticket and hop on a snow bus that will take you out to the glacier and walk on it. Those little dots left of center are some buses out there. We had done this the last time we were here with the kids so we didn't need to do it again. Now some pictures of the surrounding mountains.

After that we continued north towards Jasper National Park. Our final destination for the day. This road follows the Athabasca River and that in turn, turns into the Athabasca waterfall.

This river is pretty wide with a lot of water that runs through it. If you notice that a lot of pine trees are brown. It looks like they had a pine beetle infestation here since our last trip.

All of that water has to go through this gorge. Amazing when you look at it and hear the sound.

According to the literature, this is called the battlefront. This is where the water and the rock are battling each other.

As we look around us here, we are in awe of the beauty of nature and feel very lucky to be able to take this trip and just enjoy it.

One final look as our next stop is our campground. There are several campgrounds in Jasper. Last time we were up here we stayed at the Whistler Campground. That one is being modernized and it has over 780 sites in that campground alone. Grace was lucky to book us into another with electricity.

We would have never fit with a fifthwheel and are so glad that we are doing it with a pickup camper. 

The Athabasca River from our campground. I am going to add a piece of information to the blog posts called critter count. This is where we will list the critters we saw for the day.

So yesterday's critter count is 2 bighorn sheep alongside of the road. Didn't get a picture of them though.  1 ground squirrel that got run over by the car in front of us. Poor thing.

Day 6. Today we are just recouping and taking a day off from driving. So we are just hanging out in our campground, waiting for the rains to pass.