ahhhh

[textualdeviance]

We're just back from Canada, and a tad worse for the endless driving, but otherwise quite pleased. Everything was absolutely gorgeous up there. I'm sure it's maybe not such fun in, say, February, but in August, it's lovely.

I must say I was rather unimpressed with the Big Fucking Mall. Only about 1/3 of it is anything other than just a garden-variety downscale mall. Frankly, Alderwood has better shops, and Belle Square is really the quintessential mall experience. Mall of America (the other Big Fucking Mall) is even better, actually. Better upkeep, nicer stores, etc. So going to Edmonton just for that is kind of a waste of time. Good thing we had a nice room, though.

The real value of the trip was going through the Rockies. Jasper is an adorable little mountain town out in the boonies, and Banff is a fairly large upscale tourist trap which just happens to have astonishing scenery. It kind of reminded me of South Lake Tahoe, but without the casinos, and with a bit more upscaleness. I wish we had done the Icefields Parkway instead of the Edmonton-Calgary run (which was interminably boring.) The only interesting thing about that was heading over from Calgary toward Banff and seeing a community of absolutely enormous houses. They're probably about the size and scale of the stuff on East Lake Samm, but without all the trees in the way to hide them from each other, the net result is something like seeing a huge subdivision of McMansions. Except they weren't tract homes in the slightest; all were unique, and they all had large lots around them (at least an acre or three each.) They just happened to be huge.

We didn't take a lot of pics, but what we did take is here.

More later after I've gotten settled back in and such.

Comments

[thefirstalicat.livejournal.com]

While tooling around that area, did you get up to Drumheller? Home of the Royal Tyrell Museum, one of the finest paleontological museums in the world, with tons and tons of dinosaur skeletons, etc. You can actually participate in a dig in the badlands through the museum too, though we didn't get a chance to do that when we were there.

Calgary - we stayed overnight, then took a train (the Rocky Mountaineer) through the mountains to Vancouver; train traveled only in the daytime (we overnighted at Kamploops) so you could see all the scenery going by....

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Oh! I wish we'd seen that museum. It sounds really cool. We were marveling at geological phenomena, mostly. I grew up in the Sierra foothills, and have lived near major mountain ranges my whole life (not to mention the huge volcanoes all over the place, here) but the Rockies were just spectacular. They're very different kinds of mountains than the ones I'm used to.

We decided the next trip, we're doing rail all the way across, and then flying back. I've never done a long train trip before, so that's always been on my list.

[thefirstalicat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Royal Tyrell's incredible. There's also weird rock formations around there, called hoodoos - they look like bizarre mushrooms that someone must have intentionally carved, but actually they're natural formations caused by erosion.

We've traveled from Montreal to Halifax via train, and the aforementioned Calgary to Vancouver route; also I've gone from SF/Oakland to Seattle and from SF/Oakland to Denver by train. Loved every trip - more so now because we're "old" so can justify getting a sleeping car instead of having to sleep in the regular train seats!