Banff
5,790 km
After Calgary, I courted Banff for, like, a day. Couldn’t stand it. Sorry; just not my cup of tea. It’s like… like Disney World without the service quality. Exhausted parents pulling bawling, over-stimulated toddlers amidst line-ups for mediocre restaurants. Or the cinema — who goes to see a movie in the middle of one of the most beautiful mountain ranges on the planet for crying out loud? And that was still low season–I’m told there is no room on the sidewalks after Juky 1. Honestly, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
village. Relatively quiet among clumps of enormous Cedars, with vistas of monstrous hoodoos. It was colder than a ticket taker’s s
mile at the Ivar theatre on a Saturday night (Tom Waits), though. Two degrees when I exited my tent at 7 a.m.
by forest; you would never know it’s there if you didn’t ask (which you wouldn’t if you didn’t know it was there). The town arose in 1903 from the CPR’s need for coal to power its steam engines. Its sole purpose was to mine coal — which it did quite successfully, creating a boom. In just a few years the mine’s production could not keep up with demand.