Four summers ago, end of first trip

On the due date, our son arrived at Tacoma Seattle airport and after our great stay in Washington's Olympic area, we were ready to travel on: Vancouver was our next goal.

Driving a motor home in a very big city is not our hobby, so we headed to one of the suburbs that had  a campground plus a perfect public transport connection with down-town Vancouver.

 (all images are clickable)

What a lovely city! We had noticed the difference with the USA already, in the sizes of the parking lots, the overall image the buildings offered, peculiar... I guess we did all the touristy things. We saw a steam clock, especially the men in our company were intrigued by that ;-)! I enjoyed the galleries on our walk, the brick stone buildings, the people and yes, Chinatown was great too. The only thing we did not do, however,  was shopping. The city of Vancouver seemed to offer mainly similar shops that can be seen in every big city, that was not what we had come for. Though at the same time I realize that the nicest, most funny little special shops can usually be found in the area around down town. But this was not a shopping trip...

Next day we left for our trip North. Our son had done his research and composed his wishes for this Canadian part of the trip, so we mainly followed his advice. We came along Hell's Gate, saw for the very first time the huge damage in the infested trees that was caused by pine beetles. From this journey on we would see the warnings every year again, in each and every state that we traveled through. We also noticed that Canada has an extensive railway net for freight, we never had one night sleep without the whistling and passing of seemingly endless trains...

After a few days we arrived in Jasper, a starting point of the Ice field Parkway, a route that connects Jasper with Banff, both cities situated in and connected by National Parks, see for a map this site

Being no ice lovers at all, we were nevertheless very impressed with this wonderful winter land in summer. Snow capped mountains, ice fields, the most wonderful colored lakes, lots of them, huge waterfalls and an overall glorious landscape. We visited the Athabasca Glacier and Columbia Ice Field, Peyto Lake, the Johnston Canyon and last but not least Lake Louise. One place was even more gorgeous than the other. By then the end of our trip came near, so we had to travel back to the Billings, Montana. We crossed the Kootenay Rockies, made a short stop for a quick dip in Radium Hot Springs and left Canada at Coutts.

 

Once we arrived in Billings we had to clean and winterize our motor home and take it to the storage facility. Our son flew back to Holland; we took the plane to our island via Denver and Miami. This first USA trip, four summers ago, had been fantastic, there were so many memories to cherish!

This first series of five posts recording our travels throughout the United States have been written with the help of my memory, our RV Road Atlas and the many, many pictures that we made. Next year it will be easier, for from that trip on I kept a journal... parts of the voyage are described here, in this post and here

I hope you enjoyed reading, thank you for visiting my blog,

 Regina