Our Trip West

Rob and I had the privilege to spend two weeks in Western Canada. We flew to Calgary on May 9, after work. Westjet has a direct flight to Calgary from the Kitchener-Wateroo airport, so this was extremely convenient. We rented an RV, and drove it around for two weeks, and flew home from Calgary on May 24. We drove 4806km. And we took 966 pictures. I haven't had time to fully sort through all of them yet, but here's a preview.

The first week, we drove across southern BC to Vancouver, up to Whistler, and then continued northwesterly back into Alberta and Edmonton. The second week we did less driving, and spent our time in Banff and Jasper National parks, eventually ending up back in Calgary for our flight home.

Here's some pictures of our RV. We rented from Cruise Canada, and we advertised for them the entire two weeks :) This was what they call their "Compact RV", it is essentially a Ford F350 pickup truck with a mini-house plopped on it. It wasn't big, but we didn't feel too crowded. The bed was over the cab, and there was plenty of room - length & width - but not an abundance of headroom.

This picture was taken at our first campsite, a provincial park not too far from Calgary, we stayed there the first weekend, and attended worship services in Calgary. There was quite a bit of snow there, as there had been a big snowstorm in Calgary a day before we arrived. It was quite chilly when we woke up Sunday morning! 5C inside the RV (which thankfully had a furnace, so Rob would turn that on, then crawl back into bed until the RV had warmed up!)



This picture was taken at our campsite in Blue River, which is in BC. It was a lot warmer there!



Inside the RV there was a tiny kitchen, a really tiny bathroom, a little kitchen table, a couch (those could both collapse into single beds if necessary). We had trouble with some cupboards staying closed while driving so we tied them shut.



Unfortunately, I only took pictures of the main area when we had our clothesline up - which was every day to dry our bath towels. I used a camping clothesline to do this, stringing it between the overhead cupboards, and it worked well, and I was very glad I had brought it along since there wasn't anywhere else to hang stuff.



All in all, having an RV worked out very well, and we would probably do it again. Having done it once, we've learned a few things (what to expect, what to bring, what not to bring, etc), and so could probably enjoy it even more if we had the opportunity to do so again. Renting an RV is certainly very popular out there - we saw lots of RVs from Cruise Canada, as well as from other agencies.

One of the highlights for us was our trip up the Jasper Tramway. It was cloudy that day, but not raining. More about this in a later post, but here's Rob and I at the peak of the mountain.



This is Mt. Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, it reaches 3954m.