Canadian Rockies

 OK, I'm busy working on my Shahnameh chapter this morning, so I don't have a lot of time to blog, but I'll steal a couple minutes. Expected a lot of pictures of mountains in the next few days. As much as I enjoyed going to the Elks and Stampeders games - and as much as I like both Edmonton and Calgary - the the memorable moments from the trip, not surprisingly, centered around driving up into the Canadian Rockies. It's like when you finally get to the Taj Mahal or the Hagia Sophia, and you know that it's going to be amazing, you just can't process how amazing it is. I knew we were going to slide up into the mountains, but that's a far cry from actually doing it. We had a free Sunday for exploring, mainly because we screwed up the scheduling when we reserved our plane flights (thank God for senior moments), so we had planned to drive up through Banff and on to the Continental Divide. However, we were barely outside of Calgary when we first saw the Rockies in the distance, and I just about had to pull over. Extraordinary and humbling, and, again, expect many more pictures.

I was driving, so, unfortunately, I don't think I enjoyed them as much as I would have if I could have just been a passenger (I was trying to check them out and not actually drive off the road). If I had been on my own I would have taken some of the little side roads to see where I would have ended up, and probably never made my flight.