Helen Lake

July 23, 2015

We had been intent on hiking to Helen Lake for the past three years and finally got to it on this trip.  This is a popular hike but the vast majority of people stop when they reach the lake.  The views are much better 1 km on when you gain the ridge.  Even better would be the trek up to the top of Cirque Peak, but we decided to leave that for another time as the weather was dicey and we were too lazy, as it is an additional 1600 feet of elevation gain.  This is a fairly spectacular area but it was windy and cold up on the ridge so we donned our down jackets, gloves and toques and sat out of the wind to have our lunch.  We thought for sure that we were going to get rain as the clouds kept on coming through but we were lucky and the rain went south of us.

It was really cold at night and our last night was very cold and damp.  We had enough tenting by this time but would have loved to hike for another week.  Just when we get into hiking shape, it is time to go home.  We drove back to Calgary and spent the night and then we drove home on Saturday.

Please click on any image to enlarge.

On top of the ridge above Helen Lake

Helen Lake looking back from the ridge

Katherine Lake looking forward from the ridge

Meadows in full flower

Cirque Peak

Crowfoot Mountain and Glacier, with Bow Lake

Bow Lookout

July 22, 2015

The weather was unsettled so we took off fairly late to do a short hike up an old fire service road to a lookout over Bow Lake.  The beginning of the walk is another tourist attraction with a paved path to a viewpoint of Peyto Lake.  One tourist described the colour of Peyto Lake as that of a mint milkshake.  After the viewpoint, another paved path, which is part of an interpretive loop, takes you to the old road.  The tourists essentially vanish at this point and we had the road to ourselves.  Once we were at the end of the trail, a few people came up but it started to pour rain so we headed back down.  This was not a stellar walk, but good for a rainy day and good short hike to allow our legs to recover from yesterday's 22 km hike.

Peyto Lake from viewpoint

Bow Lake from lookout

Rain on its way

Molar Pass

July 21, 2015

The trail head for the hike to Molar Pass is directly across the highway from the Mosquito Creek campground, so it was very handy to just pop across the highway to begin the hike.  This was our longest hike at 22km and it was glorious.  Very few people hike to Molar Pass so we had the whole place to ourselves until we were coming back through the pass, where we met two other people who happily mentioned that they did not encounter any other hikers.  Later on we met a few more late hikers while we were hiking down.

The scenery is stunning once you gain the ridge and view the expanse of meadows and wonderful mountains.  We sat in the warm sunshine on a rock out of the wind and had our lunch.  Then we wandered through the meadows on a small trail until we decided to head back as it was a long hike.

Molar Pass was our favourite hike this year as the trail generally follows the creek, which you must cross numerous times.  The walk through forest is really pleasant and after a short boggy section, one emerges from the forest and the views open up, especially after getting up onto the pass.  The meadows, which were in full flower, are serene and the nearby mountains are very scenic.

Mosquito Creek

From the top of Molar Pass, looking back

After crossing these meadows

Molar Mountain from beyond Molar Pass

Plain of the Six Glaciers - Lake Louise

July 20, 2015

As our hiking guide book states, to many tourists, Lake Louise IS the Canadian Rockies.  This is borne out by the absolute masses of meandering tourists from all over the world who visit Lake Louise.  It had been years since we visited Lake Louise and the reams of visitors have resulted in the construction of three levels of parking near the lake.  It is a bit of a trial to escape the throngs as you must navigate through them on the lakeside paved pathway.  One tourist asked us to take her photo as she posed along the lakeshore.  After a while, the numbers thin out and it gets better.  However, there is a tea house en route to the Plain of the Six Glaciers and the trail is busy with hiking groups and horses and whatnot.  After the tea house, which we did not actually see as it is back in the trees, the numbers dwindle and the hiking is pleasant to the trail’s end.

We sat on a rock up the scree slope and had our lunch while taking in the tremendous views of mountains and glaciers.  We chatted to a guy from Australia who was visiting his daughter who is in Canada on a work visa.

Lake Louise

Mt. Lefroy on left, Abbot's Pass, Victoria Glacier is top right 

Abbot Hut atop the pass

Local critter (Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel)

Looking back down to Lake Louise

Fireweed

Lake Louise with Chateau Lake Louise resort at far end of lake

Canadian Rockies: Banff National Park

July 19, 2015

This was our third annual journey to the Rockies for a bit of hiking.  As usual, we drove to Calgary and spent the night prior to driving to our camping area the next day.  We chose Mosquito Creek, which is approximately 27 km north of Lake Louise, on the Icefields Parkway.  Mosquito Creek is more of a transient campground with many trailers and such coming in the evening for a one night stay before moving on.  The campground was full every evening and many had to drive on to find a site somewhere else.  There were only a few of us there for a longer period.  Mosquito Creek is a very good campground with a lot of nicely treed sites with a lot of space between them.  For the most part, the place was quiet, with the exception of some traffic noise from the highway and a group of loud young men on our last night, who slammed car doors and bellowed until the early hours.

The Rockies are quite a draw for international visitors.  We encountered a lot of Germans, Dutch, Americans and some Swiss and locals, of course.  The Americans tend to be the most friendly and happily gush about the splendour of the Canadian Rockies.  The majority of people rent motorhomes and seem to spend a lot of time inside of them rather than out.  And we think we have a lot of gear packed into our small car, but then we are continually astonished at the monstrous motorhomes and trailers that pass through.

Bow Glacier Falls

By the time we got our tent set up on Sunday, we didn’t have much time for a long hike so we went on a short hike to Bow Falls, just up the highway.  The national parks are loaded with tourists who meander along at a snail’s pace.  We had to spring past them for only a short distance as they generally do not go very far before returning to their tourist buses.  The walk to Bow Falls is very short and very easy, we found a nice rock to sit on near the falls and had our lunch before returning to our campsite for dinner.  Please feel free to click on the pictures to enlarge....

Bow Lake with the falls and Bow Glacier in the distance

Adios Espana

Madrid has endless nightlife, we laughed as we left the apartment this morning at 6:00 a.m. and found the streets full of young people still out on the town.  The garbage crews were out as well, they never experience a lonely shift, as this city never sleeps.  We walked down to the plaza to catch the express bus to the airport, people were everywhere and all the city buses were running and busy enough, considering the hour.

Madrid is very noisy, we were lucky we had an apartment with a view of walls and other apartments, as that indicated that we were not on the street side, which would have resulted in little sleep, our place was very quiet at night.

When we got to Brussels it was raining like mad and very windy, but we were about to be spoiled by our Belgian friends who picked us up at the airport and took us to lunch.  We had a lovely lunch, then we checked into our hotel and the four of us walked to an Irish pub.  After a fantastic visit, we bid our friends farewell.

Tomorrow we fly home, we are planning to take a bus to the airport but there is to be a trade union strike, so we don’t know how it will all work out.  Plan B is, of course, a taxi.

Last Day in Madrid

It was a gorgeous day today, sunny and hot.  We walked over to the navel museum but the whole street was cordoned off and swarming with guards and cops.  The friendly military-looking guy apologized profusely that we could not enter the museum due to an ‘emergency.’  The museum is located in a military building and he did not know when the situation would resolve.  There tends to be a lot of armed guard-type personnel hanging around government buildings in Madrid, we see them a lot.

We walked over to a large park in Madrid, the Parque de el Retiro, as it is a pleasant green space with a lot of statues and fountains.  The Monument to Alfonso XII is fronted by a small concrete pond where people rent rowboats to float around the small pond.  We found this somewhat bizarre as we are accustomed to canoeing in gigantic bodies of water.

Next, a walk into old Madrid was on the agenda, where we roamed the streets and plazas but avoided the main tourist areas.  We stopped for our obligatory café con leche in Plaza del Angel, and sat outside at a table.  The prices in Madrid are double what they are in the rural areas of Spain.

We don’t really rely on a map, we just walk and use the sun to determine which direction to go when we have had enough walking and want to go back in the direction of our apartment.  We stopped in at our apartment as John needed a cooler shirt, we had a yogourt, as we need to consume all of our groceries today, and then we walked to the Sorolla Museum.

Sorolla, 1863 - 1923, was a painter from Valencia, on the south coast of Spain, he moved to Madrid in 1890.  His paintings of the seaside are beautiful, he captures the light of the Valencian coast in his paintings.  He was a prolific and hard working painter, painting for six to nine hours a day.

The museum is located in the Sorolla home, which was designed by Sorolla.  It is rather unique to get to see his studio, as well as many other rooms with furnishings, which are now used as a gallery for his work.  This is a wonderful museum to visit as there is an Andalusian garden, a collection of ceramics, and Sorolla’s paintings, it is all quite idyllic.  We visited during a time of free admission and it was not busy; quite the contrast to the Prado, which had a lineup a mile long when we walked by earlier in the day.

The Sorolla Museum is located north of central Madrid in the trendy Salamanca area, which is very quiet with nary a tourist.  After we left the Sorolla Museum we walked back into the thick of things and bought a good bottle of wine, as this is our last night in Spain.

Tomorrow we have to get a very early start to catch the express bus to the airport to catch a flight to Brussels.  We are looking forward to having lunch with our Belgian friends tomorrow, but the weather will be a shock, as it is supposed to be windy and wet with a high of 10 degrees in Brussels, today we had a high of 26 degrees or so.  After an overnight stay in Brussels, we fly home.

This has been another spectacular trip, we have loved all of it, Spain is an exceptional country for travel.  We appreciated the various areas of Spain, they have a strong regional identity and promote the products from their region.  We were forever encountering shops in the tiniest of villages that advertised ‘Products from Extremadura.’  We are hard pressed to find anything from Extremadura in Madrid.  And the people were a joy to meet and interact with, even though our communication skills in Spanish are limited, it just does not matter.

Palacio de Cibeles

Parque de el Retiro

Monumento Alfonso XII and boats in the concrete pond (you can't make this stuff up)

More buildings in Madrid, we don't really care for the style of the buildings

This is as close as we got to the Prado, sculpture of Velázquez outside the Prado

Sorolla Museum

This bird was singing in the garden outside the Sorolla Museum

Andalucian garden at the Sorolla Museum

Madrid

I am always floored when in large European cities; there is so much focus on food and shopping.  There are restaurants, bars and cafes by the zillion, no matter what time of day it is, people are eating and drinking.  We are going to miss the food shopping in Spain, as it has been endlessly wonderful for us.

This morning, we set off for the archaeological museum, which is terrific.  Everything is displayed so well, but the Spanish really set the plot for the visitor by planning your route.  We have noted this before and it has got to the point where we want to just go about at random to subvert the plan.  The museums also provide the most dullest jobs on the planet, there are a lot of attendants who just stand around and watch, we don’t know how they don’t go out of their minds with boredom.  If any visitor even looks as though they may do something untoward, the attendants are wheeling in their direction immediately.  A screaming kid was chastised while the mom was trying to get him to stop, even though he was having his screaming fit in a corridor between two sections.

As is often the case in most countries, the city museums get all the goods, when it would be better if the artifacts were left where history put them.  We are seeing the originals which we should have seen on our recent travels through Spain.

The museum is just too large to cope with all in one day and we burned out after about 3.5 hours.  So we pretty much flew through a lot of the Roman and Greek sections as we are quite familiar with those after our travels to Italy.  We completely skipped the Christian era and the more modern sections as they don’t hold much interest for us.

The strength of the archaeology museum lies within its Iberian and Celtic collections, in our opinion, of course.  We spent most of our time there looking at some really wonderful pieces and the historical information provided is extensive and informative.

After we left the museum, we basically walked around the city for the rest of the day.  The city centre is rather compact and can be walked a lot quicker than we realized.  We walked through a lot of the main plazas, which are quite busy.  The traffic is heavy and the streets become mobbed as the evening wears on with people on foot.  Other than those who are constantly trying to hand out food leaflets, you really don’t get bugged in Madrid, which is great.

This is an art city, known for world-class art museums, but we have a limit on the amount of time we can tolerate in a museum and the archaeology museum did us in today.  We want to visit the naval museum tomorrow and will see how much more we can take.  We really like Madrid and want to explore more of the city, it is a great city to just walk in.

Iberian 4th - 1st century BC

Iberian, The Lady of Baza

This is exquisite, Iberian, The Lady of Elche

Iberian, 3rd century BC, The Great Lady Offerant

Vettonian culture, 3rd - 1st century BC, they think these granite animals marked grazing territory

Celtiberian culture, 2nd - 1st century BC, a familiar tool

Lusitanian culture, 3rd - 2nd century BC, silver and gilded silver

Bronze Bull from Costitx, 5th - 3rd century BC

Livia, wife of Emperor Augustus, from Paestum, Italy

This is what we looked like after spending too much time in the archaeology museum, Roman mosaic, of course, The Genius of the Year, late 2nd century

Rooster from the Greek collection

Gate that we are too lazy to bother to identify

An overdone monster in Madrid

Plaza Mayor

Palace Real, another one where the architects went all berserk