Lake Louise

It’s time to load up with groceries again. We drive Tor through the Banff "refreshing area" to a Safeway. While it feels vaguely familiar, it is odd that at 9 a.m., many of the delivery trucks have yet to arrive…many shelves are bare. What is there is enormously expensive. Milk is over $6 a gallon. Spend close to $100 and don’t have all that much to show for it. But we are now stocked with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables.

We head up to Lake Louise about an hour away. Another famous Fairmont we can’t get reservations at, but we will have lunch! We pull into another National Park…this time the Rockies are not only snow-capped, but we have our own glacier to look at.

The village of Lake Louise consists of only a very nice visitor’s center and a strip mall. We venture up to the lake via cab. We are warned that a 40 foot motor home should not make the climb. You simply cannot prepare yourself for this view. I do believe it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I can only come up with five of the great wonders of the world…if I had the internet available I could look it up…if this is not one of them, someone has made a vast error.

I find it difficult to describe it without being sophomoric. The soaring pines meet the brilliant blue waters without a shore line. The mountains are spotted with pale blue glaciers and the caps are covered in snow. We learn that the glaciers are blue because they contain no air bubbles. We learn the water is so dazzling because it picks up “rock flour”, a sort of silt, as it pours down the mountain. We’re not sure that these two theories are compatible, but I’ll look it up when I can.

There’s a guy dressed in a leiderhosen-like outfit playing an alpine horn…and quite badly at that. But he adds to the ambience.

We enter the Fairmont, again quite smartly dressed, and are told that only hotel guests will be seated for lunch in the dining room overlooking the lake due to the great numbers of people. Rick presses them…we are seated at a window table. I’m very grateful. Terrific lunch, but not nearly as intriguing as the one in Banff. But this view wins hands down. After lunch we walk to where the water meets the land and just stare for a very long time.

Back at the village, we pick up fresh croissants for breakfast (not bad at $1.79 each) and some wine and beer. Truly outrageous prices. $20 buys a very mediocre bottle of wine. Did find a local sauvignion blanc that I had had for lunch in Banff …still tastes good…wasn’t just the view.

Way back In Columbia, MO, we stopped at a place called Bass Pro…kind of a LL Bean on steroids for the outdoorsman. Bought a couple of interesting food things that I thought would be good for simple dinners. Pulled out a gumbo mix, sautéed some chicken and chorizo…thought I had some leftover shrimp, but we must have finished it off…added some leftover Spanish rice and couscous…it was terrific and made enough for reruns.