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We are now in Toronto, Canada hanging out with Kirb's cousins in the city before we head off again. This blog is pretty long, it contains a month worth of travels... So to bring you up to date with our travels, we have now been on the road for 1 month and 2 days. We had a fantastic 3 days relaxing in Hawaii before we headed to the West Coast of Canada. Kirb hired a board and surfed at the famous and crowded Waikiki beach just before our plane flight out of Hawaii cause there were no waves on the north shore where we were staying. We spent a couple of days in Vancouver and then took the ferry out to Vancouver Island and went camping for 4 days in Tofino with Kirb's cousins Brendhan, Pat & Kev and their friends and girlfriends. Tofino was awesome, we surfed in 15 degree water (wasn't really that bad, I will even give it a go back home in Oz in the winter), went whale watching and sat around a camp fire drinking, eating and hangin out. We saw a small bear on the side of the road which I mistook for a large black dog! I didn't get that much sleep that night?We then hired a car for our Rockies adventure and drove from Vancouver up to Whister to stay with Kirb's cuz Brendhan for a few days and went hiking and sightseeing. We caught a gondola up WhisterMountain and hiked to the top of the mountain. We were lucky to see some awesome scenery on the way up but had to wait at the top of the mountain until a storm passed; visibility was quite poor on the way down...We drove from Whistler to Jasper and stayed in Clearwater (about half way to Jasper) for the night and visited the HelmckenFalls. The falls are 3 times the height of Niagara, standing at 150m. We continued on to Jasper and stayed for a couple of days and hiked around the top of WhistlersMountain (not to be confused with WhistlerMountain in Whistler). We cheated and took the tramway up cause we were running out of time and the round trip to hike the mountain is about 7 hours. We also saw MaligneCanyon, EdithLake and AthabascaFalls.We left Jasper and headed towards Lake Louise via the Icefields Parkway Highway and saw the most spectacular scenery, I felt as though the windscreen was a painting. (Note from the ed - it actually was a painting, I stuck some posters to the car windows and left Jess in a carpark in Edmonton for 2 days, it was heaps cheaper that way, and she loved it, took heaps of photos). This stretch of the Rockies is definitely the most dramatic of all. We stopped by the Columbia Icefield and took a bus on the Athabasca Glacier... I was silly and was wearing a short skirt BUT we thought we didn't have enough time to go back to the car to get changed before the bus left (we found out later that a bus leaves every 15 minutes)... It was really cold but just amazing standing on the glacier. The next bear sighting of the trip was when one ran out onto the road in front of our car, we stopped and I managed to get a photo?? We stopped by PeytoLake, just out of Lake Louise and it is the most spectacular lake I have seen. We have seen a lot of striking blue glacier fed lakes but Peyto was the most amazing. We arrived in Lake Louise in the evening and walked part of the way around the lake and saw the famous chateau and the glacier that sits behind the lake. Pretty amazing day!!!We went canoeing on MaligneLake early the next morning to beat the crowds cause sights can get crowded here in summer break. We headed to Banff for the afternoon and checked out a few sights, swam in the Banff Hot Springs and then drove to Calgary for our flight to Toronto. Kirb did all the driving in our PT Cruiser while I played back seat driver and got car sick on the windy roads (well only the first day, that could have been because of the nasty hangover from my 25th birthday celebration though)?
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