Coming to the end

Tuesday 17th September

We had turned off our alarms the night before ready for a lazy morning after a busy trip so far. We definitely had a lazy morning and got up late morning to get ready for the day. We had arrived at our airbnb in the dark so hadn’t seen the amazing view from our balcony last night.

We drove into Banff to look around the town for the afternoon. Beautiful scenery on the drive as usual…

When we arrived, we first popped into a bakery for something small for lunch. The town was really nice but quite touristy (to be expected).

We did some shopping and got an ice cream from Canada’s best ice cream chain ‘Cows’. I had Moo York Cheesecake and Wowie Cowie!

When we had finished our shopping, we drove back to our apartment for some relaxing time – someone even had a little siesta!

We then got ready to go out for dinner. We had booked somewhere nice near Banff for our last proper night of the trip in the Rockies – Juniper Bistro. There was a lovely view from the restaurant.

We had a very yummy dinner. Their style is sharing, which suited us well!

Over dinner we chatted about the trip and how lucky we were and how amazing it had been. But the one thing we hadn’t seen was much wildlife which is quite unusual! We were hoping to have seen a bear, elk, moose or something from the comfort/safety of our car, so we decided to go on a little dusk time drive to see if we could see anything. We drove up to a viewpoint near the restaurant, which in itself was very pretty.

But no bears or anything else!

We got in the car to drive back to our apartment and on the way down from the viewpoint Harry stopped the car… A bear?! I thought. No unfortunately not, but a huge snowy owl just standing in the road, which was beautiful! Unfortunately he flew away too quickly for me to take a picture.

We drove the rest of the way home and hit the sack.

Wednesday 18th September

We had another lazy morning and then packed up our bags to check out of our lovely apartment. We also parted ways with our bear spray – as hopefully we wouldn’t come across any of those in the town centre or at the airport!

We checked out and wandered into Canmore town centre. We really liked Canmore town and it was so picturesque being surrounded by the mountains.

We sat down for some lunch at The Wood restaurant outside in the sun with a view.

We still hadn’t tried Canada’s well known dish Poutine (fries, cheese and gravy) and it was on the menu, so now was our chance! We also ordered their special summer salad to go with it. They were both delicious!

Once we finished our food, we decided to walk it off with a walk along the boardwalk by the river that we had seen earlier.

Finally, we finished our time in Canmore with an ice-cream from ‘Lovely ice-cream and treats’, which sounded well, lovely! And it sure was!

We then drove just over an hour from Canmore to Calgary, which was so much bigger than either of us expected!

We dropped off our trusty white Toyota Corolla, which had served us well on our adventure, and then checked in at the airport. We got our flight from Calgary at 7:30pm local time, landing in Seattle about 1h30 later at 8pm local time, because of the hour time difference. We got a shuttle bus to our hotel that we were staying at near the airport before our flight back home to London on Thursday.

Wow, what a trip it’s been – one of our favourites! Loads of memories and photos to keep for a long time.

Thank you so much to everyone who followed along, hope you’ve enjoyed the stories. See you all soon back at home – TTFN! Barry x