Banff

Basically, we declared a lay day after a hectic first week, so there's not much to report.

Another bright, sunny day in Banff. We did all of our domestic chores in the morning, and then headed into the town for a spot of retail therapy. Hardly bought anything, but it was nice wandering around with no pressure to be anywhere.

After lunch we ambled along the walking trails beside the Bow River all the way from one end of the town to the other. Every sight you get of the countryside around here is spectacular, but the sight of the famous Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is iconic.

Canada was only about 20 years old when they pushed the railway from one side of the continent to the other to unite the country both symbolically and economically (and assist it's defence). However they almost bankrupted the country doing it, and had to come up with some scheme for raising money. Tourists! So the new fledgling Canadian Pacific Railway company built luxury hotels at various points along the railway, all very similar, and the most iconic and well known is the Fairmont Banff. There's a very similar one at each end of the line at Vancouver and Quebec, at Lake Louise, and probably many others that I'm not aware of.

The idea was to lure tourists to the snowfields, and to the newly opened up west coast, loosening their purse strings at every opportunity. They even marketed travel packages from New York through Niagara Falls to Toronto, across Canada staying at Banff, on to Vancouver, then by luxury ship to Australia and New Zealand stopping at Hawaii.

It brought enough interested tourists to the area to bother putting in ski runs and rudimentary rope lifts, which eventually spawned the snow and skiing resorts of Banff and Lake Louise, and the rest is history.