July 9: We ate breakfast with Phil, Diana, and Sam and then headed out for our "last day" of our family vacation. We went to Banff first, which is around 20 minutes away from Canmore. Its a very touristy town..but with good reason...its beautiful, and has MANY shops to check out! So we did just that...enjoyed the beauty and shopped too.
I was the official child carrier with the aid of my craigslist purchase prior to the trip (it ended up being a mighty good purchase in our case!). Ben tried it out once along our trip..and maybe 20 minutes into Christian's ride he was officially done. I think the fit of the carrier isn't meant for manly men like Ben :) Christian's legs were too spread out.
Anyways, Christian actually learned to fall asleep in it, which totally surprised me. I normally carried him on my back..but I was trying to protect him from the cold wind during the first part of this day.
We did ALOT of walking this day. After we had hit up many of the shops, we started walking towards what we thought was the Banff Springs Hotel a.k.a. the castle hotel. We didn't really know where we were going, but it didn't take us long at all to walk into these beautiful gardens. There were at least three different brides getting their pictures taken and an actual wedding ceremony taking place while we were in these gardens. They had very neat looking wood pieces too...
After a quite a bit more walking..some may call it "hiking" as there were trails and such to it. We went by some pretty falls, along the Bow Falls Trail. This trail also led us in front of the Banff Springs Hotel.
This was the view from what we considered to be the end of the trail, right after the falls.
There was not a direct path up to the hotel, so we ended up walking the horse trail that was established for the rich folk that stayed at the Banff Springs Hotel to utilize on their horseback rides. It perhaps is not recommended to take this path..but it was kind of like the glacier moment, we're this close, we are going to get there one way or another. Perhaps, I also wouldn't recommend wearing flip flops this entire time. Oh well, you live and learn. We finally got to the "castle" and made our way inside to check things out. I've never been to England or to a castle for that matter...but that's exactly where it felt like we were. Even the "butler" boys were dressed in kilts. It was a very formal hotel..not exactly our type..but it was fun to walk around a bit. Probably the best thing that Christian found was outside a couple blocks away there were a group of extremely tame and friendly squirrels (or maybe they were ground hogs?). It was hilarious to watch him interact with them!
We then went to our hotel for the night..which was about a mile away from Lake Louise. It was beautiful! The first view is from our balcony..the second is of the outside of our room. We were the second one from the left on the top.
There was still daylight, so we went to check out Moraine Lake which is about 20 min away from the place we stayed. It was AMAZING. I personally thought it was even more beautiful and surreal than Lake Louise. Other than the fact that it was getting pretty stinkin cold by this time..it was just an amazing view! We did walk part of the path that was there, but decided we probably shouldn't go much further because we still had to go back..and we had Christian as bundled as he could be!
We went out to eat (the worst place we went the whole trip...bummer), and then headed back to our "cabin" to enjoy the fireplace to warm up to. It was a great place to end our family vacation for sure!
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