Fantasy Caravan, Day 7 - Calgary to Banff

We had a relatively short drive on Friday, and we weren't supposed to arrive in the Banff campground until afternoon, so we all got to enjoy a slow start on Friday morning.

We had our travel meeting in the morning before travel. Jim Pelley, a tour manager with Fantasy, came to greet us briefly.

Donuts from Tim Hortons were available to satisfy our sweet tooths (sweet teeth?).

Getting the information about our travels for Friday.

Jeff and Julie are our tail gunners, and, in addition, Jeff is a trivia master.

We had been told that Calgary has a population of 1.5 million. All the towns from here on out are small, with a total population in all of them put together of 400,000. The largest city will be Anchorage at 290K.

On Friday, we would be driving to Banff, Alberta, at 4500' in elevation, a drive of about 77 miles, so less than two hours. We would need to leave the campground in McMahon Stadium carefully to avoid driving over any power or water lines. We would all be leaving in a pretty short period of time, so Jeff was releasing each rig as there was space for it to go.

Carl driving Gracie out of the parking area to another lot where we would hook up the Jeep.

We were nearly the last to leave as we had been among the first to arrive into the campground a few days before.

On our way out of Calgary, we saw the ski jump from the 1988 Olympics, still used for training of athletes.

We were driving west and started seeing the western edge of the Rocky Mountains.

We got to our campground in Banff National Park. There was a little bit of confusion, seemingly caused by the rangers at the campground -- they told us that we would not fit into the campsite to which we had been assigned, and so our alternative was to park along the outer rim road of the campground and boondock. Hmmm... really? We proceeded to that location, and then unhooked the Jeep and drove to the assigned campsite. It was a shared site with another rig, and there was no other rig there -- I counted off paces to determine that we could fit Gracie into the spot -- and then we went back and got Gracie and got her parked. I'm not sure what had gone on before we got there... but it seemed that the campground staff was just stressed and not terrifically helpful. We eventually all got parked.

Gracie in our site at Tunnel Mountain Trailer Court. The sites are "interesting" - they are half-moon type pullouts along straight roads. Some of the pullouts are for a single camper, others, like ours, are shared between two campers (there is a class C parked behind us in this picture). We had to do a little maneuvering to ensure that Gracie was well off the pavement and not infringing on the site behind us, and that the Jeep was parked without being on any grass, but we definitely fit.

We took a walk around the campground -- it is made up of really straight roads running southwest to northeast and bisected by roads running southeast to northwest and the campsites alongside the roads.

When we got to an intersection of our road with one of the bisecting roads...

... we saw gorgeous views in all directions.

This is the mountain just south of the campground (I think it is Mt Rundle).

Another view of Mt Rundle from the campsite of Jim and Kris

This is also part of the view at Jim and Kris' site. So beautiful! I think this is part of the Bow River Valley.

In the evening, we joined another member of our caravan, Peggy, in attending the ranger interpretive program, "Bats, Batty, Battier". It was informative and fun -- a bit geared toward children, but still interesting for the older crowd.

We had a busy day planned for Saturday, so settled in for the night early because we wanted to get plenty of rest.