Day 1 (22 October)

Bri posing in front of our brunch spot

Today started very early with our 7am flight out of LAX. We spent almost the entirety of last night packing, so the exhaustion set in almost immediately upon sitting in our seats on the flight. We woke up to snow covered landscape out the windows and the pilot welcoming us to Calgary. Upon landing, we went to pick out our rental car and were immediately met with confusion as there were no offerings under the “compact” category we had selected. Not to worry, though, a representative from Alamo quickly looked around and assigned us a Mazda CX-3 as a free upgrade. It was a good thing, too, as our original selection was not a great choice for the winter conditions, whereas this CX-3 had all wheel drive.
We got on the road for our one hour drive from Calgary to Canmore - the location of our Airbnb. Even with the hours long flight and the long drive into town, we were still too early to check in to our room, so we chose to stop and get something to eat. Chez Francois was the restaurant we chose, and it turned out to be a great choice.
We messaged our host to see if we were able to check in a couple of hours early and luckily she said yes. We headed over to the complex and checked in at the front desk to get our room keycard. We found our room, got cleaned up, and immediately fell asleep. After having been awake for far too long with much too little sleep, we were able to catch up a little bit with over 12 hours of rest.