Sat 20th Aug - Radium to Calgary

Mmmm breakfast

We stated the day with coffee in bed - all motels in canada have coffee machines with little bags of real coffee in.
Then after we had got our bits and pieces together we sought out done breakfast in the restaurant next door to last night's. With an aim to lasting all day we ordered 3-egg omelettes complete with hash browns and 4 slices of texas toast (= super thick slices) (there wasn't any choice about having those add-ons anyway). My omelette was particularly tasty with smoked salmon, asparagus, onion and goat's cheese in and hollandaise saucer on top. Mmm. During breakfast we had cause to apply some Off! (insect repellant) and insects were instantly repelled. It is a most excellent product.

The House of Many Faces

While we were eating a weird house opposite caught our eye so we went to look at it. It liked like lots of little shacks had been built up on top of each other and it turned out to be the workshop and home of a crazy swiss woodcarver. He had long reddish dyed curly hair sticking out from under the brim of a massive red knitted hat, and was also wearing a long pink skirt. We had a look around along with some other curious visitors. The most bizarre bit of all was a section full of doors with knobs telling you to turn them and when you did jets or showers of water sprayed out of strategic places - the walls, the ground, the mouths of wood carvings etc. It was very amusing (luckily a very warm day too). Apparently there are also goats living right on the top and they can walk round on a couple of levels of rickety looking walkway. The whole place is full of mad looking carvings of faces or figures in all sizes of branches and stumps. The funniest one was a full figure of a guy with a big willy (a stumpy piece sticking out of the branch with an suitable looking hanging formation behind) - the only carving he'd had to do was to add a face with a beard and perch a pair of sunnies on its nose. I selected the very best wood carved face to bring back home with me which would also fit in my luggage which ruled out most of them.

 

Nice view from the bath

After a chat we headed up to radium hot springs to take the waters for a couple of hours. The hot pool was warmer than a bath and we could look up at a mountain from it. Apart from being accosted by (and having to engineer a polite escape from) a born again christian lady it was a very pleasant and relaxing experience. We finished it off with a 'kiddie cone' sized ice cream, easily big enough for a regular sized adult.

 

 

 

Spindly burnt trees

Then it was time to enjoy the last stretches of amazing scenery on the way out of the mountains, including lovely blue-green rivers, huge rocky mountains, glaciers and snow, muskeg (word taught me by mum meaning the marshy watery areas with reeds and stunted looking pines), native pine/fir forests and some eerie parts where the trees had all been killed by forest fires 10 or so years ago and the grey pencils of the trunks are still the only things standing.

 

 

 

From radium it was 130 km to Banff where we got petrol and then another 200 km our so back to the safety of Pat and Earl's in Calgary. It was lovely to see them again, just like coming home (in fact they are 'home' on the Canadian maps on the sat nav). Nancy was there too and Pat had made a tasty chicken+blue cheese+sour cream dinner, which we washed down with a nice game of Tonka. Nancy won.