Day 2 (23 October)
Today began by awakening from our 12+ hour slumber to get ready for our all day adventure in Banff. We headed into downtown Canmore to get bagels at the Rocky Mountain Bagel Company. These were different than any other bagel we’d had previously, as these bagels were much thinner and lighter. Bri remarked that these are her favorite for the aforementioned reasons, so we may have to stop by for a couple more breakfast sandwich bagels before we leave next week.
We headed back to our room after grabbing breakfast and prepared for the day in the national park.
Our tour guide, Gordon, picked us up at 10 in a Ford Transit van filled with four other people - a family of three from New Zealand and a woman from Germany. We headed into the park and Gordon took us to Lake Minnewanka. While driving to the lake, we saw a huge elk and slowed down to take some photos. After that, we headed to Downtown Banff for some lunch and retail adventuring. Gordon told us about a store along the main road called The Spirit of Christmas and said that it had been featured in many Hallmark Movies. We obviously had to stop by and look at all of the decorations. After dining at a nice ramen place and stopping by Starbucks to get our obligatory collectors’ cup, we met back up with the group and headed out to the Surprise Corner and Mount Norquay Lookout. Two Jack Lake and Lake Louise were next on the itinerary. We stopped for a while at each lake to walk around and take photos. Lake Louise was definitely the most popular place we went, and there were quite a few people.
One thing that we noticed through all of these stops is the apparent lack of crowds. It looked as though we were only surrounded by locals. We asked Gordon about this and he shared that the busy season was summertime and the months of July and August saw almost half of the yearly tourists to the region. We counted our lucky stars that we happed to plan our trip just outside of the busy season. We learned that Canadian Thanksgiving (14 October) marks the end of the busy season, so we barely missed it.
Our tour ended after Lake Louise and we headed back to our Airbnb for the night to watch movies and eat pizza.
