Canada - May you said, oh yeah!- Travel Day May 24th

[parisdisneyfan]

Sorry its taken me a while to start on this, life got in the way, but here it is.

Day started nicely, it was dh birthday as well as our travel day so he had the day off work. After pressies, breakfast and saying goodbye to dd, as we would be gone by the time she got home from work, I headed off to work - only a 5 minute walk. I had left all my packing for dh to do as he is the expert packer and almost seems to enjoy it especially since we bought packing cubes! After last year he said he would make sure he split our stuff so neither of us would be left with nothing! We had been looking at the weather forecasts for Banff/Jasper and it said expect it to be cold. If you remember back to the end of May it was actually quite warm here in the UK so we had to dig out thermal stuff and big coats etc which all took up quite a bit of space but we were only there for a week this time so we managed.

Friday at work (in a local school) is always good as it is Biscuit Friday so the morning went quickly assisted by a lovely assortment of biscuits and cakes in the staff room at break time. I also do lunch duty so as soon as that ended I was saying my goodbyes, have a nice break etc and hoofing it down the hill home. We didn't have to worry about lunch as I had had my Friday treat of a fish finger sandwich from the school kitchen and dh made himself a sandwich at home. Our flight was 6.30 so we planned on leaving by 2, with an hours drive up to Heathrow, giving us plenty of time unlike last year

For once all went to plan, we dropped off the car at Heathrow Parking and walked into Terminal 5. Bag drop and printing boarding passes was fun, we always seem to have problems with the automated system. However a pleasant surprise when we printed the boarding passes as they said seats 18a &b which were PE. Had our purchase of an upgrade gone through(see my thread on chat about this!), were we just lucky, or had they noticed it was dh birthday? We would have to wait until we got home as I didn't have my credit card app on my phone As everything had gone to plan we actually had time to waste. Dh went and bought some new headphones, and I just picked up some water and migraine tabs as dh had forgotten to bring them. He doesn't get them often but you can bet he will get one if we don't have tabs.

Anyway boarding was very orderly, snacks and water given out, left about 30 mins late but made most of that up on the flight. We did enjoy PE for the leg room, wider seats and the food service however the seats were rock hard, very little padding and by the end of the flight we had pretty tender behinds Also because of the trays being stored in the arms we couldn't raise them, not much of an issue on this leg but would have been nice on the way back as we each could have stretched out on a row of 3 due to it being only half full. Our meal consisted of Caprese Salad, bread roll, Beef bourguignon with dauphinois potatoes followed by choc orange cheesecake and cheese and crackers. We had decided that we would try and stay awake so that we would sleep when we got to the hotel. I think we managed it as I remember the 3 films I watched - Instant Family, Smallfoot and On the Basis of Sex - all 3 were good IMO, the fact that I stayed awake is my usual benchmark for that

We landed only 10 minutes late and got through the electronic immigration eventually - not queues but the computers usual dislike of me! Went to pick up our luggage which had quite a delay so shades of deja vu from last year. We headed over to the car hire pickup, one of the things we like about Calgary is that you can walk to it, no faffing with getting on buses. Dh has gold membership so we went straight to the booth and collected a nice, very new (250 miles I think dh said)Ford Escape.

We made the slight mistake of putting in the post code for the hotel and ended up overshooting it but we managed to turn round and were soon at the Hotel Clique. The room was fine, bit garish decor but clean and the bed was comfy. We knew we were only going to be here a few hours just to get some sleep before heading north. By now it was around 10pm (although around 5am to our UK bodies) so we crashed out very quickly

Apologies for no photos, will make up for it later !

[clucky1966]

Are you doing a road trip across the Rockies? DH and I did that 2 years ago and it was the best holiday we've ever had (apart from Disney of course) ;-)

[parisdisneyfan]

Originally Posted by clucky1966

Are you doing a road trip across the Rockies? DH and I did that 2 years ago and it was the best holiday we've ever had (apart from Disney of course) ;-)

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Originally a couple of years ago that was the plan, but various things happened so we ended up doing 2 weeks in Banff (well Canmore) last August. This week ended up because we still had a valid park pass, the flights were cheap (shoulder season)and fitted with my school term. We thought we would have got Rockies out of our system with this trip but no, we still want to go back again! Totally agree it is a super holiday.

What do you think to the scenery etc between Rockies and Vancouver? We are unsure whether to just do Rockies as a holiday or combine it with Vancouver but that means possibly wasting a couple of days driving across. However some people have said that there isn't much to see and it is basically just get it done, I would appreciate your views.

[WileyCoyote]

Ooh I think every holiday should start with Biscuit Friday !
Looking forward to reading along.

[Wordsworth]

Interested to see how you got on since you were a week after us.

Driving from jasper to the rockies takes you through what I think is some spectacular scenery (if you take the highway 99 route from Kamloops to Vancouver on day 2), and the road itself is an experience, but stopping points are a bit limited in some bits. I have the two day drive in my trip report if you went to read my thoughts in a bit more detail.

[Lola]

We did the Rockies and Alaska starting with a train trip from Toronto to Jasper last year in May. Weather was great, sunny and warm. People in the pool with the roof open on the Alaska cruise. Fantastic trip

[kateh134]

Looking forward to reading along as we plan to do a trip to Canada next September.

[parisdisneyfan]

Originally Posted by Wordsworth

Interested to see how you got on since you were a week after us.

Driving from jasper to the rockies takes you through what I think is some spectacular scenery (if you take the highway 99 route from Kamloops to Vancouver on day 2), and the road itself is an experience, but stopping points are a bit limited in some bits. I have the two day drive in my trip report if you went to read my thoughts in a bit more detail.

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I'm planning on reading your report as we have wanted to do Seattle down to San Diego (Border to Border sort of! ) and we wondered if we should tag Vancouver on to that and maybe do the train from Vancouver to Seattle?

[parisdisneyfan]

Originally Posted by kateh134

Looking forward to reading along as we plan to do a trip to Canada next September.

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We did a 2 week trip in August to Calgary and Banff last summer, here is the report https://www.thedibb.co.uk/forums/sho... php?t=1093981

[parisdisneyfan]

Originally Posted by Lola

We did the Rockies and Alaska starting with a train trip from Toronto to Jasper last year in May. Weather was great, sunny and warm. People in the pool with the roof open on the Alaska cruise. Fantastic trip

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Wow, sounds fantastic, long train journey!