Back to Vancouver via Kamloops
The last photos of the valley (site of the golf course)
behind the Banff Springs Hotel on our second evening. A brief rain shower
passed through and left a beautiful rainbow that lasted quite a long time.
After a relatively busy five days travelling and sightseeing
between Jasper and Banff, we boarded a new train to take us back to Vancouver
with a last overnight stop in Kamloops. There were not many of us from the
northward trip going back to Vancouver on the train - some people left at
Jasper and others in Banff after the bus portion - and we were hoping that our
little band of rowdies would be kept together. Unfortunately it wasn't meant to
be. Since we weren't travelling as a group, four of us were in one car and four
in another, so we made a point in Kamloops of exchanging information in case we
didn't see each other in Vancouver. This would be quite possible since our
train down from Jasper had about 18 cars in total, and we added another four in
Kamloops. This made for a very long train and about 700 passengers!
Here are some photos of the trip back.
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| Kinbasket Lake |
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| The cairn marking where the last spike of the CP Rail line was driven on November 7, 1885, linking all of Canada by rail |
And, of course, we couldn't leave out a few more food pictures from the train!
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| Tuna Nicoise salad |
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| Hamburger |
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| Berry crumble with ice cream |
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| Shuswap River |
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| Sicamous Lake, the Houseboat Capital of Canada. The western answer to the Trent-Severn Waterway! The lake is huge, so it can handle the 300-plus houseboats that travel on it every year with room to spare. |
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| Nearing Kamloops |
We stayed overnight in the Sandman Inn in downtown Kamloops.
We actually liked it better than the Banff Springs! A modern, comfortable hotel
with a sports bar, Moxie's restaurant AND an ice cream parlour attached to the
hotel. All across the street from a big park and the river. There was a summer
series concert in the park going on when we arrived; we took a walk around to
stretch our legs with the music in the background.
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| In Riverside Park |
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| The Rainbow Valley, so named because of the various minerals in the rock that oxidized into different colours. |
The landscape changes south of Kamloops, into a desert climate. Actually, the extension of the same desert the includes the Grand Canyon. Very different from anything else we'd seen so far. It was hard to remember that we were even in Canada!
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| The Thompson River |
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| Part of a large herd of female Bighorn Sheep |
The two photos above show the confluence of the Thompson River (clear) and
Fraser River (cloudy). Due to the Thompson River flowing through numerous lakes
where the rock flour, sediment from the glaciers, can deposit to the bottom and leave clear water to run.
The Fraser doesn't run through any lakes so it can't lose this sediment.
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| Hell's Gate, a very narrow and treacherous part of the river, so named by the first British explorers to try to navigate the Fraser by canoe. Wonder why? |
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| Mount Baker, in Washington State |
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| Arriving back into Vancouver |
We had one night in Vancouver before we headed off to San
Francisco and Napa for a few days of rest from our vacation. We didn't know the
days would be quite as long and busy on the Rocky Mountaineer so it turned out
that this add-on was a great idea.
