Day 8--Too Many Places to Name

Barb, Sub, Dharma, and Chris got a sound night's sleep and we all had a wonderful home-cooked breakfast. The kids kept commenting on how great it was to have a real breakfast and how much they enjoyed it. I didn’t sleep much at all because I was too nervous about today’s drive through Glacier National Park. During conversation around the B&B last night, the talk turned to The Road To The Sun…the only way through Glacier National Park. A biker who was staying the night had driven the road that day and told me it was a nail-biter. The guide books say this is a road “not for the squeamish” and the biker agreed. As I said about Yellowstone, I don’t like driving on cliffs. Well, that is all The Road to the Sun is…40 miles of shear drop offs to one side. Anyway, after a sleepless night, a great breakfast, and loading the car we set of for Glacier National Park. We hit The Road to the Sun which is 56 miles long and cuts the park almost in half, and I was thinking “this isn’t so bad” as we drove around Lake McDonald near the west entrance of the park. The road got steeper, but I was hugging the wall and said “Hey, I can handle this. It’s not so bad since I am against the wall”. I SPOKE TOO SOON. Just a few miles later the road did a zig zag thing and I ended up on the outside lane….heading uphill for on a road that was just wide enough for two cars to pass each other…with a drop off beside us that went down for thousands of feet. I was petrified!!! But obviously I made it since I am writing this. At the top (36 miles into the drive) there is a visitors center where we stopped called Logan’s Pass. We took pictures, and I got a chance to enjoy the scenery before starting the descent on the other side of the mountains. We also drove past a lake called St. Mary’s which provided beautiful reflections in the water of the mountains around it. VERY SPECTACULAR DRIVE…I recommend it to anyone who has the courage to try it. But remember…once you start…you can’t back up and quit. There is nowhere to go but up and over.
After leaving Glacier National Park, we drove just a few miles and entered Canada. (Thank you, Shaun, for all the guide books you bought us. That little note on a page somewhere about needing a permission letter from the non-present spouse to take your child across the border really came in handy because they asked for it at the border crossing.) The drive was pretty uneventful for the first 100+ miles…more brown land and smaller rolling hills or flat areas. Then we drove onto the Trans-Canadian Parkway/HWY 1. It took us into the Canadian Rockies National Park. The mountains loomed up around us and the scenery was once again beautiful. We drove to Lake Louise (thank you, Jenn, for suggesting this stop.) We parked in the parking area and walked down a short path through the woods and emerged at a lake surrounded very tightly on three sides by mountains. The mountain on the opposite end of the lake had two glaciers on it (see picture at start of today's entry). The view was truly breathtaking! After taking advantage of the photo op, we hit the road and turned onto the Icefalls Parkway which took us through the Jasper National Park (also part of Rockies National Park). We definitely saw why it was called Icefalls Parkway…the road had mountains on both sides and the ones on the left were dotted with glaciers (ice fields) of all shapes and sizes. They were incredible to see and went on forever. We finally ended day 8, 13 ½ hours after we started. We traveled 506 miles today for a trip total of 2874.9 miles. WOW!

Before I close today, I want to thank Chris’ family for encouraging her to come on this trip. She has been a wonderful addition to our little traveling band!!!