Canada « If It Weren’t for Carhartt This Would Just Seem Really Self-Indulgent

Jasper

January 19, 2008

By paying £15 each to offset our carbon foot print we felt secure in the knowledge that somebody had planted a tree next to a motorway in some far away land where carbon dioxide smells of strawberries and crude oil tastes like chocolate. But carbon footprints are REAL, and we felt ours heavily upon us. It was that of a nazi jackboot, kicking us repeatedly in the head with episodes of My Family and The Vicar of Dibley on the sole TV channel, and taunting our dehydrated and flu ridden corpses with tiny bottles of water for £1.50 a go. The sadistically unhelpful cabin crew then moved aside for the pilot to deliver the final blow, taking, as he did, three attempts to land. The only positive to be drawn from the journey was that it did more harm to us than the environment.

On arrival in Calgary we were greeted by a succession of elderly people dressed as cowboys/girls, as if in some family theme restaurant from which they could never escape. Some were placed at important junctures along our corridor odyssey, while others glided by on airport buggies waving slowly and grinning vacantly. In our flu-induced delirium, it all seemed a bit like a ghost train. We make our way to the waiting coach and collapse to the news of heavy snowfall (yay!), thus closing The Ice fields Parkway – aka, The most beautiful drive in the world – and adding an extra two hours and a sea of never-ending beige prairies to our six hour transfer (nooooo!).

I have never in my life seen a place as beige as Alberta. The only reprieve from the eight hour monotony was a truck stop at Red Deer which much resembled a giant crazy golf course. By this point our mutual flu virus was taking full advantage of our exhaustion and so we only managed to stagger into, ‘The Donut Mill’, exiting with a hot blueberry scone, feeling a bit bemused.

We eventually arrive at our hotel after twenty four hours, relieved to discover that such online review lines as, ‘never recommend the Jasper Inn to anybody’, and, ‘the furniture was broken and there was broken glass all over the floor’, were completely unfounded. This briefly silenced the Kelly’s criticisms of my ‘book-before-doing-any-research’ strategy, but will never make up for our ill fated trip to Tenerife four years ago.
Such was the first journey of our travels. It was ,however, to be the only disappointment of our Canadian leg. Apart from a slight lack of snow and a decent board park, there was nothing else to bemoan. The bacon on offer amongst the breakfast buffet was also a little chewy.

We spent the first three days marinating ourselves in various flu remedies and acclimatising to both the freezing cold of a Canadian winter, and the scorching heat of our hotel room. We learnt on our first morning that we were in no fit state for riding. After only six hours sleep and numbed by disease we only managed a few runs before we got the bus back down the mountain and The Kelly puked in her hat. Even the most breath taking scenery I have ever encountered did nothing to rouse us from the emotionally anaesthetizing grip of flu.

It’s hard to take it easy when so accustomed to the six-day-a-year all-out assault on the French Alps, but we concede two days off to explore the ,probably, unmatched beauty of Jasper National Park. We take a guided walk along the Maligne Canyon, a frozen river snaking it’s way through a narrow gorge lined with frozen waterfalls. So inspired are we by all this nature stuff that the next day we skip off gleefully into the forest trails all on our own, safe in the assumption that all the bears are asleep. Then, an hours walk from any building, our path ahead is blocked by a wolf. At first inquisitive, it soon realises it’s out numbered and trots off into the forest again. We leg it back to town and stick to snowboarding from then on, only viewing the local wildlife from the safety of the taxidermy museum in town. Wolves are BIG.
The rest of the trip passes in a glorious haze of empty pistes, Alberta beef and hot tubs. It even snows on our last day, making the drive back to Calgary along the Ice fields Parkway as beautiful as it could ever be. Which is good, as our coach broke down half way along it, leaving us stranded for three hours whilst the driver hiked to the nearest ranger station for help.