An Awe-Inspiring Scenic Highway

Somehow, it seems as if quite a few of my friends are posting pictures on Facebook

 this week of trips that they took 1, 2, 3 or more years ago.  It's enough to make me

nostalgic too, harking back to my tour of the Canadian Rocky Mountains 9 years ago. 

On this trip I encountered a breathtaking clear and sunny day for my round trip drive from Jasper to Lake Louise and return, on Alberta Highway # 93, which is called the "Icefields Parkway."  It's an appropriate name because the highway exists mainly for tourism, and while one does encounter a few trucks they remain few and far between.  Big campers, on the other hand, are frequent (no surprise). 

 

The Parkway has been aptly called a "national treasure", and it certainly is no less than that.  I pity all the people who gallop east or west across the mountains, and miss this north-to-south chain of breathtaking natural miracles.

 

Here's a map of the Parkway as published by Parks Canada (easy to find online if you want to be able to pick out all the fine details):

 

 

I left Jasper right after breakfast, and with all the numerous stops along the road for the incredible scenery and for taking photographs, I didn't get to Lake Louise until well after noon.  I "shot the works" by using the valet parking at the Chateau Lake Louise and eating lunch there, in a bay window overlooking the lake, while a harpist played gently in the background.  After a walk along the lake shore, I returned north, and realized something I hadn't quite understood before.  The mountains all looked different with the sun striking them at different angles and changing the arrangement of light and shade.  So I had to do a few repeat pictures on the way north.  And I was back at Jasper by dinner time. 

 

So with that, here's an album of some of my best pictures from that day-long round trip.  First, the drive south, beginning with the morning fog lifting away.

 

 

 

 

 

These two pictures show the Sunwapta and Athabasca Glaciers, both of which pour down from the edges of the gigantic mountain top Columbia Icefield that gives the Parkway its name.

 

 

 

The southern half of the road, from the Icefield back down to Lake Louise and Banff.

 

 

 

A characteristic mountain river in a glaciated valley -- one look will tell you why geographers call this a "braided" stream.  All those sand and gravel bars have been eroded down from the surrounding mountains by the running water through thousands of years.

 

 

Saskatchewan River Crossing has one of the several service areas along the road.

 

 

Peyto Lake is the largest lake which you will see along the Parkway.  The milky green colour is typical of glacier-fed lakes and is caused by fine-ground silt suspended in the water.

 

Bow Lake with the Bow and Crowfoot Glaciers.  This lake is the birthplace of the Bow River which flows through Banff and Calgary.
 

 

Herbert Lake is plainly non-glacial, as you can see through the clear water.  Lake Louise is just around the corner behind the nearest ridge of mountains.

 

The view at lunch in the Chateau Lake Louise was even more spectacular than the prices (but only just!).  Rooms at this iconic resort hotel run from $600 to $900 a night all year round, with the highest prices for the rooms with the lake view.  Meals are not included in those prices. 

 

On the way back north, I stopped for a bit of a hike at Mistaya Canyon.  It was a long, very steep climb down the mountainside trail from the highway to the edge of the canyon, especially challenging with my bad knee, but it was worth every second of the effort.

 

 

 

North of Saskatchewan River Crossing, as you approach the Icefield and Sunwapta Pass, the road zigzags up the sharp headwall and then you get this amazing view back down into the Saskatchewan River valley.

 

 

And finally, one last snow-capped mountain view.

 

 

Would I do the same one-day marathon again now?  Probably not.  But since August 14, 2007 was such a spectacularly beautiful day, it's just as well that I did it all in one go when I did. 

About That Breakfast....

This is one of my informational posts, with helpful hints.

All information in this post is based on my own personal experiences.

Feel free to skip it if you already know all about hotels and their breakfasts.

 

Note: this post does not address all-inclusive resort properties

which cater primarily to the flight+hotel package-tour trade.

 

One of the biggest areas for confusion in the hotel trade these days revolves around the all-important first meal of the day.  It's actually become pretty uncommon, at least in North America, to trip over a hotel that doesn't offer some sort of breakfast on site.  Having said that, though, everything else about the morning meal is pretty much "open season" -- particularly in urban hotels in major cities.

 

Many people's first thought is to find a hotel where breakfast is "included" in the room rate.  Even that can be a bit of a shell game, though.

 

Many hotels advertise that they have "free continental breakfast".  That matters because, if there is a full breakfast buffet with hot and cold foods, "continental" may only cover the cold side.  You'll pay extra to get the hot food.  In some cases, it only covers (in the original, literal meaning of the term "continental breakfast") a single bakery item plus coffee -- and everything else costs extra.

 

In lower-end hotels, at the bargain end of the spectrum, the continental breakfast can be as minimal as a kettle, packets of instant coffee, and a box of doughnuts (utterly useless to me since I'm diabetic).  I've also found, especially in the States, bargain hotels that advertise eggs and bacon -- and what you see in the hot tray is a stack of perfectly circular manufactured white patties with a neat yellow circle in the middle of each white circle.  It neither looks nor tastes like a real egg -- and I don't even want to know what the list of ingredients looks like.

 

At the upper end, in the high-level business and deluxe chains, neither breakfast nor anything else is ever free -- unless you pay a much higher rate to get the breakfast "included".  This means that you have to know up front how much the hotel charges for its breakfast so you will know if the add-on rate is worth paying (quite often it isn't).

 

The best bets are found in two middle-level chains that I know, because both have a chain-wide standard of the free breakfast.  You can book these hotels with complete confidence as to what will be on offer.  These are the Hampton Inns (in the Hilton portfolio) and the Holiday Inn Express chain.

 

Both of these chains offer assorted baked goods, cold cereals, fresh fruit, yogurt, and multiple hot dishes as well as juice and coffee -- and in both cases the coffee is reasonably good.

 

In almost any other chain that I have used, sadly, you have to know the individual hotel to know the quality and variety of breakfast foods on offer.  Yes, this means you have to learn by doing -- also known as "the hard way". 

 

If travelling in the upper echelons, you can always look for an "executive" or "club" room, or some such designation, which includes access to an exclusive lounge where some sort of breakfast will be on offer, as well as snacks, hors d'oeuvres, or drinks later in the day.  Again, you need to know on a case-by-case basis whether these offers are worth the higher cost.

 

In those higher-end hotels, the one way to beat the game is to stay often enough that you reach a higher level in the company's frequent guest loyalty program.  My regular readers know that I make extensive use of Hilton's Hhonors program, which earns points at all hotels in the Hilton portfolio including the Hampton Inns.  Whenever I check into a full-service Hilton or Doubletree (except resorts) I am automatically entitled to free continental breakfast, and to lounge access if an executive room upgrade is available.  In some properties, they just drop the other shoe (so to speak) and give me a full breakfast buffet for free -- and who am I to complain?  But again, if I can get upgraded into the executive floors and the lounge, the evening "hors d'oeuvres" are usually quite generous enough to become, in effect, dinner. 

 

Once you go overseas, the rules all change again.  One thing I've noticed is that some of the hotels in the U.K. and Europe are much more generous with the freebies for frequent guest plan members.  In more than one Crowne Plaza hotel (think upper end of Holiday Inns), I've been booted to the executive floor and into a deluxe suite by way of an upgrade.  The lounge at the Hilton I stayed in on my last visit to London had a generous full breakfast buffet -- and their evening "hors d'oeuvres" buffet had ten or twelve different trays of finger foods, both hot and cold, and free alcoholic drinks.  And these bonuses were on free stays which I paid for with my accumulated points!

 

Finally, in resort properties, you can pretty much forget about any kind of freebies or bonuses.  In lieu of the free breakfast and executive lounge, a major Hilton resort gave me a $10/day credit for the resort's restaurants.  Since the breakfast buffet was $24/day, you can see just how far that credit didn't go in covering the cost of breakfast!  That was generosity itself compared to other comparable resorts which offered me precisely nothing in the way of extras.