Last day in Banff… I’ll be sad to go actually. The place feels to me very much like a cross between Queenstown in New Zealand with an older European feel like Innsbruck in Austria. Either way, it’s a very cool little town with plenty of character and attracts the young and old alike. Other than the fact that this place probably gets bloody cold and is full of adventure junkies in the winter time, I think I could live in a town like this for a while. Probably not indefinitely – the educational opportunities are a little limited! I heard the local highschool band practising this afternoon and it was almost (note: not quite) as bad as the Pakistani Military Highland Bagpipe band… how alarming! 😀
We went for a drive out to Canmore this morning which is about half an hour from Banff to check out the Nordic Centre which hosted many events during the Calgary Winter Olympics and has some nice look outs over the Three Sisters Mountains. Yep, for some reason mountains that come in threes, are always sisters and not brothers. Why is that? Is it the same reason that cars and boats are usually a ‘she’? I don’t know. We also had a look up at a place called Quarry Lake where I was foolhardy enough to take off my shoes and stick my toes in for a dip! Well, there was little French-Canadian kids toddling about in the lakeside on what passes for a beach (really fine little rocks, not even rounded pebbles) and I figured it couldn’t be that bad if these kids were puddling in the waters edge.. Stayed in the water for all of about… oh a minute and a half and felt sufficiently refreshed so jumped out of there quick smart!
I noticed that for a rather small lake there were dozens of fish jumping out of the water and it took a while to figure out why. There were mosquitos there. Big ones and when I got into the water I could see them and some other little flying gnat thing buzzing about low over the water and the fishes were jumping out of the water attempting to catch the bugs. Very cool way to catch some dinner and it covered the lake surface with pretty ripples from the fish plopping back into the water.
After Canmore we head back to Banff where Aunty Mary decided to go do a short hike up Tunnel Mountain and I went in search of a ND (neutral density) filter for my main camera lens – it’s so bright here with all the ice and snow that the good old CP (circular polarizer) filter that does the trick at the beach just doesn’t cut the mustard to reduce the glare enough and we are hitting big, huge, fuck off, glacier territory soon. Thankfully Banff has enough tourists to support a decent camera store and I managed to buy a Hoya Pro ND filter for about $80 less than I would have paid over at PhotoContinental near home. Nice.
I also bought a wee folding umbrella because today I saw the most bizarre thing around lunch time. The weather was fantastic this morning… about 11 degrees, sunny and crisp, blue skies and lovely for our drive to Canmore and probably got to about 20 degrees. Arrived back here about lunch time and noticed a little dark cloud in the west. By the time lunch was on the table, the little dark cloud was over us, thunder and lightening, very very frightening and dumping a fair amount of freezing cold water on us with absolutely no warning whatsoever! The weather just spun on a dime, never seen anything like it and definitely not at lunch time. By mid afternoon it was all gone, no sign of it, blue skies again? Werid.
Oh, and I found myself a unique souvenir of Canada. When I travel I like to buy lapel pins for my coffee table at home and not much else by way of souvenirs. I prefer to find one unique piece to remind my of my entire trip so as not to clutter my house up full of stuff that will evenutally be thrown out or doesn’t look quite right at home anyway. So in Turkey, I bought a Baloch carpet (and a tonne of pashmina, but I gave most of those away!), and in Pakistan I bought a Istfahan rug (and some more pashmine, some of which I gave away!), in Indonesia, we bought the fat man, and so on and so forth. Well, I went into a little gallery here and found a wall art piece that is in a maple tree design and is made by an artist in British Columbia. He makes them all to order and puts customized initials into the maple tree and I have had it shipped by surface mail back to Australia (it should just beat me home). It is the only thing here that has caught my eye and I think it will make a lovely souvenir of my time in Canada…
