So today we checked out of the Caribou Lodge, packed the minivan and headed off through the countyside to Penticton. Our hotel here has a huge indoor pool - and our rooms have views onto it!! We had dinner in Denny's - an American diner type of restaurant.

After our free breakfast in the Keg Steakhouse (part of the booking shemozzle) we went on the Discover Banff Tour - we were taken to a wonderful lookout just above Banff, to the hot springs which created tourism for their town, out to the Banff Springs Hotel and to a river with rapids. Help me out guys.......

So this morning Tom and I left the girls in Banff and we caught a coach to Calgary where we collected our Hertz minivan. We figured that with all of our luggage plus the six of us, we would need something big to take us back to Seattle. We then drove the van back to Banff and found the girls who had been exploring Banff. Mid summer and the girls had been snowed on whilst walking down to the plaza!!! The hotel, in the meantime, had found a room for Tom and I f...

Well, yesterday is where my travel diary ended - dodgy I know - we aren't home yet,. We'll see how we go. We had breakfast and lunch on the Rocky Mountaineer and arrived at Banff sometime later. The Caribou Lodge is a beautiful mountains timber lodge. Unfortunately they got confused with our booking for 2 rooms - thought we meant 1 room and that the travel agent sent the message twice. There were NO extra rooms available!! We were tired and didn't really want ...

This morning we were up really early to get ourselves down to the station by 6.30am. We boarded the Rocky Mountaineer at 7.10am. It was really slow travelling out of Vancouver - we kept having to stop. There are some other Australians in our carriage, and we occupy the back seats (near the toilets). The river we're following is very swollen, from the spring/summer melt after a record cold/snowy winter. The scenery is interesting but not particularly specta...