Hey!

So it's been an interesting couple of days with nothing going quite to plan. After my last blog entry we cooked an immense meal of jacket potatoes and beans and salad and them proceeded to get more than a little tipsy with the cheapest alcohol we could find in Jasper! It was a fun but a late night and we were shattered the next morning.

We decided to leave Jasper on time, as we planned to originally. However, the weather was far from good (you could barely see 20m ahead of you) so doing one of the most beautiful drives in the world seemed a little pointless if you couldn't see any of it! That coupled with the fact that it was snowing pretty heavily (probably not by Canada's standards, but for us it was heavy!) and our car was truely struggling, meant that we thought it best not to do the entire drive to Banff that day. So the plan was changed to head to a nearby HI hostel under an hour from Jasper and stay there for a night before continuing the rest of the way the next day (hopefully in better weather!). We got to the hostel, which turned out to be a series of log cabbins in the middle of nowhere. Absolutely beautiful in the snow, and so cozy inside with a real log fire and very comfy sofas. It had no running wayer and very tempramental electricity but we loved it! It also had a brilliant array of board games and a table tennis table so we were very happy! We were the only people there bar the manager, a very interesting guy called Sasha with 2 degrees and a lot of travelling under his belt, plus plans to do more of both! So after recharging a little we went for a walk in the show, though it was more of a wade by this point since the snow was as deep as our thighs in places. Even though we couldn't see far the snow covered trees were beautiful in themselves. Later that evening we played a game names Trivial Scabopoly, a genius mix of trivial persuit, monopoly and scrabble! However we decided on an early night so there was no winner.

Yesterday morning was thankfully much clearer and we drve to Banff with few problems (although our 2nd hand wheel complained and rattled most of the way). The views were absolutely stunning, definately worth the wait! Although the glaciers were so covered in snow that they were hard to spot. We stopped off a few times, once to go diving into the snow, and once at Lake Louise. It's a pretty lake but after the drive it wasn't anything particuarly special. Although I am reliably informed that it is better in summer. We did get to try our hand at curling (kinda) as some stones had been left by the side of the frozen lake. Sally was a natural, I on the other hand failed miserably!

So now we're in Banff. Unfortunately we now don't have that long here but we should have long enough to see the main sights and get a feel for the place before carrying onto Calgary to catch our flight.