Monday--July 24-Day 34-The Grandeur of the Canadian Rockies

This is the town of Jasper, nestled among the mountains of the northern Canadian Rockies. First thing on this Monday morning is laundry! As we drove through town looking for a place to park our rig, we soon learned that no motor homes are allowed to be parked in town.  We were kindly directed to the place to park, about a half mile from the laundromat. So we again used our versatile wheel chair as our transport vehicle! 

You can probably imagine the sight.....three Mennonite women wheeling down Main Street  milling with tourists, pushing a wheelchair with a basket of laundry!😁 But, hey!  You do what you gotta do! And we got 'er  done! While Steve enjoyed the sights from street level, I blogged in the laundromat while Barb and Marie did the wash!
Shoulda had a picture!

And then we headed south on the Icefields Parkway.

Again, beauty overload as we drove!  Loved it!
(notice the size of the car)

We passed an area  with  these large pieces of rocks, and an occasional tree growing. Amidst all the high mountains, I wondered how they got there. Did God create this like that? or did some natural occurrance cause it?

I am facinated by God's creation! Below are several pics of the tops of these very high mountains.

Some of the mountains looked like they erupted on the one side, tipping them on edge.....

Beautiful glacier-topped mountains....

Straight rows of trees growing up the sides, at equal intervals.....

Stripes of many colors......

Stipes of gray and white....must be staight ledges where the snow collects.....
To the right (above) is Cleopatra's Needle, also know as the Lighthouse.

Turquoise-colored Bow Lake, headwater for the Bow River.

In the morning the skies were overcast and cloudy.
 In the afternoon as we drove south, the clouds started to disipate and blue skies began to peak through!

These overpasses were beautiful bridges.....for the large animals!!
They are covered with sod, and made to look like natural rock, to  protect the animals from getting hit by vehicles. They are used by  11 species of large mammals.

Here is where I was planning to post pictures of the lovely Lake Louise and magnificent Morraine Lake. But as we drove to the parking lot where we would walk to the viewing spot , we could not find a place to park! There were people everywhere! and cars in every spot! So we disappontedly moved on....😞

We arrived at Banff......Beautiful Banff....but the scene that greeted us was the same.....sooo many people, sooo many cars! We were hoping to ride the gondola to the top of the mountain, but to get to the entrance, we had to drive what seemed like half-way  up the mountain.  And when we got there, we again had a difficult time parking. (It takes several car spots to park!)  It was later in the day and we did not feel like waiting in a long line  to ride the gondola, so we sadly gave that up also. Maneuvering our rig through those many cars and tight places, trying to avoid the walking crowds, is a stressful situation!
 We were eager to get out of there!
I guess we should have previously thought it through and expected this......it is summer....it is July....and evidently thousands of other people had the same idea we did...

We made reservations at a campground, in Claresholm, and headed south, planning to drive through the evening.  At Canmore we stopped at McDonalds for a quick supper. I did not eat a McDonalds hamburger for literally years, so was pleasantly surprised at how delicious my Angus Burger was! Barb and Marie enjoyed the same. Steve devoured a cheeseburger...and finished off the meal with a McFlurry.

While we ate in the RV, we were entertained by the praire dogs and these birds, the black-billed magpie.

This is the three sisters mountain near Canmore.

As we continued south, we left the Rockies behind.....

.....and entered flat  farm country. What a contrast!

We again passed many hayfields, and then we passed this field....
MARSHMALLOWS!!😁

Around 9:15 we arrived at Centennial Park Campgound. The town of Claresholm had several museums. As we parked our rig in the site that had "reserved" on it, we saw a young man camping beside us. We didn't get a chance to talk to him tonight, but we wonder what his story is. Maybe tomorrow we will find out.