The Foreign Lands of Canada

"Oh yeah, I forgot! I promise I'll do that.."
            -Me, the last 732 times Brannan reminded me that I was supposed to contribute to the blog about our trip to Banff.

Whoops!


Now that it's a month and a half later, let's see if I can even remember what happened up there in the great white north.

...After reluctantly leaving our "glamping" spot outside Glacier, the next morning we drove up to Alberta, Canada.

Oooooh Canadaaaaa

Now, you would think that the drive between Glacier and Banff would be absolutely beeeeautiful and mountainous (like Glacier and Banff are...) but you would be wrong.  It is eastern Montana, which essentially equals Wyoming. BLECH! 6 hours of driving through that nonsense.

And out in the middle of the bleak wilderness, the only sign of civilization for hours... the Canadian border post.

The first town on the other side of the border is Cardston, Alberta. We knew they had a temple there, so we had decided beforehand that we would stop and attend a session on our way through.

This temple is one of the earlier ones, so it was all old wood carvings inside and really small with lots of levels. Also, inside the front doors used to be the outside, so when you walk in, there is a huge fountain and pool there in the foyer! Pretty neat.

After that, we headed a few more hours on towards Banff and found a place to stay. The first order of business was to find some food. I found a highly recommended place that served Poutine in all it's varieties. Now, us Yankees do not have any such creation here in the states, but it is a whole bunch of french fries covered in cheese curds and then smothered with brown gravy. Gross, but delicious! This is the classic version, but there were at least 20 other choices of things you could put on it. Oh, those crazy Canucks eh?

Brannan with his Poutine and Smoked Meat sandwich

The best part about the meal turned out to be the local Canadians being all Canadian-y. Our waiter accidentally knocked my water over all over the table and kept saying "Ohhh I'm so sowrry, eh." He apologized like 10 times as if we were completely offended. We were just trying not to laugh at his awesome accent. There was also a group of teenagers talking about their cars and everyday teenager things with those crazy accents. It sounds like Minnesotans, but more like when you're making fun of Minnesotans and you really exaggerate it. (You know you've done it)

It was weird how Canada felt like a foreign country, even though it barely is. You still had to deal with weird money and accents and road signs. And our phones didn't work! 5 miles from the border they went out of service, and 5 miles inside on the way back, they started beeping on again. We joked that if we ever needed to get the travel bug out of our system again, we'd just come up to Canada because it's juuust foreign enough to give you that little taste.

Anyway, we stayed right outside of Banff National Park and spent 2 days driving all through it.  We decided that Banff was WAY more glaciery than Glacier. Some false advertisement going on there.

Town of Banff

 It was mostly glaciers and mountain lakes and waterfalls and hiking - perfect! The lakes were all glacier fed, so they had an opaque color to them. Get ready for picture overload.

This was the first hike we did. Easy, and on a paved walkway through a narrow canyon to a waterfall.

Then we stopped at lakes along the way

Beautiful glacier above the lake

I'm pretty sure he yelled "Feet are overrated!" as he plunged into the frigid water.

The wind did that to the mountain. Cool, eh?

The next day we stopped at the tourist stops. There is a huge lodge up on a lake in Banff that only costs $4,000 per night to stay in. What a deal! However, we skipped it and just hiked up behind the lake for a sweet view of the lodge.

At the top! And I got to read a riveting plaque about the history of the lodge.

Wowza!

No, that's not a plane in the sky. It's a red canoe in the lake below!

Back at the bottom. The view from the lodge

Everything was so spectacular! The huge cliffs and blue lakes were just so beautiful.

The last one we saw was the poster child lake for Banff - Lake Moraine. It's usually more glaciery, but since it was later in the summer, the glacier was dirty and not very awesome. Still, the lake was gorgeous, of course. But if you wanted a good view, you had to work for it!

Yes, there was a trail around this, but all the crazy people  adventurous folks took to the log jam to get a better view.

Whew! Made it! Now to scramble over all those rocks to the other side...

Nice view! And all bones are intact.

And there you have it! We spent some time wandering around the town of Banff, which was very Jackson Hole/Sun Valley ish. Eating good food and enjoying those beautiful mountains. What a great vacation!

Oh, and I almost forgot the mountain sheep that was as big as our car.

That's it for now, until our next adventure!

The travel spirit lives on - Glacier National Park

And we thought we were through!  This is the first of a two-part series of our most recent international (barely) excursion to Glacier National Park in MT, and Banff National Park in Canada
Our vacation was awesome!  We first went to Glacier National Park in Montana on Friday the 16^th, leaving work early so we could make the 7 hour drive up there.  Once we arrived, we found our accommodations –

"Ahhhh Teepee, sweet teepee" we would say to ourselves and chuckle.

a Teepee!  I’d been wanting to stay in one since our honeymoon, and since this was a birthday trip for me, Melanie said OK!  It was actually pretty awesome, like camping, but there was an actual bed, we didn’t have to hassle with a tent, and we could actually stand up while inside it.  We were at this crazy place that had motel rooms, teepees, tents, RV spots, basically all types of accommodations. The top of the teepee actually was open sky, and as we lay there looking at the stars couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to us if it started raining – fortunately we never had to find out.   

Saturday morning (my birthday!), we were up bright and early and got our first glimpse at the craziness we were in for.  The motel/campsite/whatever offered a basic breakfast with a TV playing a park DVD of animals/scenery/etc., and when we went to get breakfast, a guy was taking pictures of the TV showing animals.  Whaaaa???  “And here’s a picture of a movie of animals we could have seen at the park…”  weird, but there was a lot of weird in NW Montana.   

So we went to the park and discovered that the park is really only two segments – a road called “Going to the Sun Road” and a remote section that you had to leave the park to get to.  The main road was serviced by a shuttle system, but not a very good one.  We decided to do the first half of the park on Saturday and the rest when we passed through on Monday.  After a crazy beautiful ride up a narrow mountain road, the shuttle dropped us off at the midway point, a visitor center on top of a huge pass.   

Ohhhhh yeaaaahhhhh - Bring on the Rockies!

We did a few hikes around there and had a great time.  The hikes and weather were beautiful, we hiked to a viewpoint that overlooked a lake and another hike that led through some serious cliffs.  It looked like they just dynamited the trail straight out of the side of the cliff, and the trail was rock on one side, a several hundred foot drop on the other, with a 5 or 6 foot wide trail in the middle.  We even (appropriately) saw some a family of 3 mountain goats, first on the way down the trail and then they kinda ambushed us by being on the cliff right above the trail, so we had to sneak right under them.  Fun!   
 

Hidden Lake overlook - awesome!

"Doh de doh" thinks Melanie, I assume.  Not a bad hike!

First sighting of the Goats - "Can't you read?!!?!?!" I wanted to heckle them...

Murderous beasts plot their next brutal attack - LOOKOUT!!!

We told a guy we ran into that they were there on the cliff, and he said “where? Up there?” while motioning with his trekking poles, and almost hit the goats!  Another example of the strange type of people drawn to the remote and beautiful Glacier National Park.  Using the strange, unpredictable, and not-coordinated shuttle system (in the company of some more strange people), we headed back, doing a short trail through some beautiful ancient cedars with moss everywhere.  We went to the grocery store to buy food for Sunday, and got our first taste of some Canadian accent when the checkout girl asked if we wanted some “begs” for our food.  Hehe!  Sunday we went to church and ran into one of Melanie’s former roommates parents, who invited us over for dinner, which was super random and nice!  We got to have an actual hot meal instead of the prepackaged nonsense we were prepared for and had grown so used to while traveling.   

Monday we left our fine teepee, and packed the car to travel the entire park.  We stopped along the way to see some beautiful mountain peaks, waterfalls, and lakes and had a really fun drive.  
 

Am I seeing double?

 Eventually making our way to the more remote section of the park, we were driving in to do some more hiking, and noticed a crowd stopped and gathering at the side of the road.  What could it be?  

Uh-oh... here comes trouble!

 BEARS!  There were two black bears, one way up on a mountain side, and another on the other side of the river from the crowd that we were part of, maybe 50 ft. away!  They are an incredible creature to behold when there is a barrier between you and them, and we were fortunate to be standing on a tall rock formation watching him.  Well, for whatever reason he crossed the river and disappeared into the brush.  There were some tense moments where we didn’t see him, and then we saw this big bear head pop out of the brush, maybe 25 feet away, but still down the hill.  That was enough for us, and I’m proud to say that we and most of the crowd high-tailed it right outta there back to the car.  

 We drove on to a campsite/store/trailhead area for our next hike, called Ptarmagan Trail.  It was a beautiful 3 mile hike on the side of a mountain with beautiful views of the valley, mountains, and evens some glaciers!  We made it to the waterfall we were going to see and on the way back saw the strange Ptarmagans and almost literally ran into a deer!  We were hiking along, doing our thing, and noticed a deer like 15 feet off the side of the trail.  Normally you don’t get within a mile of deer, so we stopped to take pictures of him up close.  While we were taking pictures, he wandered up to the trail, and I got a crazy idea to see how close I could get.   

The answer -> VERY!  I probably could have petted that dang thing!  Why didn’t I?  Because I’ve seen the “When Animals Attack” that shows a dude getting beat up by one, that’s why!   

Even in French...oops.  It was such a cool experience and a great way to finish up.  Monday night we stayed at a KOA on the far (east) side of the park, and went “Glamping” which is Glamorous-Camping.  We had soundly mocked it for about the last month when we first heard about it – how sissy can you get, right?  Well, we are officially converted now, having done it.  It was a canvas stick-frame tent set on a wood pad, with a porch, and inside a super comfortable, timber-frame bed.   
 

We contemplated stealing it...

Additionally, there were tent-style zip-up windows, electricity, wifi, and oh-yeah, possibly the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in in my life.  We slept soooooo soundly and almost bagged the rest of our vacation so we could just stay in that bed.  But Canada and Banff beckoned, and we could not resist the chance to travel in (yet) another foreign country.  But that is another story for a different Beasley to tell, so stay tuned!

The Final(?) Post - Japan, Texas, and Utah.

Surprise, everyone, we are back in the good ol' US of A!  We sure are grateful to make our return, grateful that we went, and grateful to you, our wonderful readers for following along on our exploits, adventures, and misadventures!  So, in this our final(?) post, we have one last tale to tell, that of our return!

"RETURN FROM THIS?!?!?!" everyone keeps asking us.  Maybe with even more exclamation marks.

Yes it's true, and it was easy to do, at least conceptually.  Physically it was quite a different story, as in the vaguely Indiana Jones-ish map below.

AAAAAAHHHHHHH We're doing WHAT?!

Rather than face a 34-hour non-stop travel day, we broke it up into two separate but equally terrible travel days. 

Day 1: Tuesday, January 29th
We hung out on the beach for one last time and at 2:00 p.m. took to the Koh Tao taxi (a Toyota Hilux with bench seats welded in the bed) to the pier, waited for 1 hour, took a 2 hour ferry ride back to Koh Samui, waited for  1 1/2 hours at the airport, took a 1 hour flight to Bangkok, waited for 3 hours at the airport, then took a 6 hour flight from Bangkok to Tokyo, arriving at 6:00 a.m and our hotel at 8:00 a.m. 
Total travel time: 17 hours, we think.

One last bit of Bangkok-ery.  Oh how we'll miss your quirky English.

We got totally hosed by our hotel in Japan, who literally had the worst customer service in THE WORLD!  They wouldn't let us in our room so we had to wait ,exhausted, in the lobby for 4 hours until noon to check in, despite the fact we'd notified them of our early arrival and even then had to pay a TON to get our room early.  We'd hoped to see some of Tokyo with our 1 day stop over, but by the time we got a room we were too exhausted to do anything but sleep.  And get sick.  Thanks, weasels.

We finally wandered out to get some food, and discovered three facts: 1)everything in Japan is in Japanese, 2)no restaurants accept debit/credit cards, 3)Japanese ATMs are a combination of #1 and #2: they are in Japanese and don't accept our our debit card.  This left us in quite a pinch as we coldly wandered around (unsuccessfully) in the dark looking for friendly ATMs until we spied the Asian travelers best friend:

We LOOOOOOOVVVVVEEEE you!!!!

7-eleven has saved us, fed us, has always been safe, reliable, cheap, familiar, and is EVERYWHERE in Thailand, and we have grown to love and appreciate it.  Once again it came to our rescue, and as we were sick and in Japan, we bought some orange juice and "Cup of Noodles" (with our credit card, which was the real clincher) and made them with the coffee pot in our room.

Not impressed with Japan...

Our cashier was possibly the friendliest person on the planet, who looked impossibly pleased that these strange white people were in his 7-eleven, gave us some sweet chopsticks for our noodles, and merrily babbled away in Japanese while ringing up our food.  One can only wonder what he was saying, but he never stopped smiling or talking, and all we knew to say was "domo arrigato."  Yet another point for 7-eleven, and we seriously discussed sending the 7-eleven corporation a thank-you card.  Sorry we didn't appreciate your awesomeness before, 7-eleven!

The next morning our flight was at noon from a different airport than the one we flew in on, so we left at 8:00, hoping to get there around 10:00, which is what our Google directions said it would take.  What Google didn't tell us is that we were about to embark on our last, most difficult, and probably impossible public transport adventure.

Our directions were something banal like "Go to the train station, go 20 stops towards Yoshigota, change to the Honkiogo train and go 13 stops to the Narita airport."  "Sounds easy enough." says I to the wife, "Lets just confirm at this helpful bus-sized map:"


"BY THE POWER OF GREY SKULL, WHAT IN THE NAME OF ZEUS IS THAT?!?!?!" is what my brain immediately yelled at me.  After a few seconds looking at it I could no longer function, just stare, open-mouthed and drooling, as this crazy contradiction of coordinates reduced my logical, engineering brain to a frightened, tiny, shrieking lemur in the darkest corner of  my suddenly vacant skull.

Pretty much...

We knew we had to do something, so we plucked up our courage and chose one of the two amazingly packed trains and got on.  Still trying to figure out what the heck we were doing, we pulled out the directions and started trying to figure out the smaller map on the train.  A nice Japanese guy about my age noticed our beady eyes and confused faces and stood up to help us, and spoke good, not great, English.  He was automatically our best friend, and after looking up some information on his smart phone, told us we should get off with him, and he would point us to the next train, and indicated our directions were pretty much the dumbest thing he'd ever seen.  So we got off a few stops later with him, he took us to a platform, told us to go to the "sheotaiotnegbbwoy" or something station, then take the "howdieitnaoe #48" train, and then disappeared. 

Every train we took for the first hour, with our packs on our backs.  Travel isn't always smiles and sunshine, folks.

So we stood there trying to remember the name, the crowded train came, and we got on.  We got off at the right station but we could no longer remember the next train, so we stood looking at all the different trains and directions.  We finally decided on one, and were about to go to that train when another kind lady noticed our crazed looks and asked if she could help.  We told her the airport name, and followed her as she spoke to the station guard at the train we were going to go to.  He said something, and most surprisingly, she took off running down the platform.  We ran after her, and she finally stopped to talk to another guard, at the other end of the platform, and they indicated we should get on that train, and HURRY!  After another few "domo arrigato's" As we were pushing our way on, I saw the train separate in the middle, the other half going who knows where, and our half going, hopefully, eventually, to the airport.  Yikes!  But we looked at the map on our latest train...

For the first time in  1 1/2 hours, we know where we are!  Just not where we're going.

Finally, some good news!  Not only did we see another white backpacker, we finally got to sit down and look at a smaller map for our current train's part of town and noticed the stops were a combination of letter and number, and that the number was going up.  We found the airport, and noticed it was the same letter, and a high number!  Yay!!!  Now the question was: are we on the airport train, which only makes a few stops, or the local train, that stops every kilometer and would cause us to miss our flight?  As we talked to our new Australian friend who is a poet publishing his first book and will be traveling around the world for 2 years(!), we noticed we were stopping a lot.  We'd been stopped for 10 minutes at a station, and noticed not only had most of the people gotten off and were standing on the other platform, but that a guy was giving me the "what the heck are you doing?" look out of the corner of his eye.  So we jumped off, stood in line behind that guy who now seemed silently relieved, and the train came and we were whisked off to the airport, where we had to pay a 360 yen ticket adjustment for all the extra trains we'd taken.  But we were there, and with plenty of time to spare.  Whew!

Soooooo,
Day 2:
Leave hotel at 8:00 a.m., 2.5  hours on the trains of Tokyo, 1.5 hour wait at the airport, 11 hour flight from Tokyo to Dallas, 1.5 hour wait in Dallas, 3 hour flight to Salt Lake City. 
Total Time:19.5 hours
Total Travel Time in a 3 day period: 36.5 hours.

The fun part was we took off from Tokyo at 12:00 p.m. on January 31st, and landed at 11:50 a.m. on January 31st.  Weird.

So now we are back, and the future of this blog is uncertain.  Moving forward we are just expecting more ordinary lives, getting jobs, moving, etc, nothing nearly as exciting as we have been doing.  We may continue to blog about more domestic things, or may discontinue it, but either way we are really blessed to have been able to have such a fantastic trip and keep such a fine(?) record of it.  Thank you all for following along and being a part of it, we have had a lot of fun making this blog and hope you have had fun reading it!