The road less travelled

After attending the splendiforous wedding of Michael and Kyle at the Tunnel Mountain Resort in Banff and finally having the opportunity to try out the Banff Hot Springs (more something I've been wanting to do than Col) we were driving home to Edmonton and decided to take the "scenic route". Now I've always had a laugh at the sign on the Yellowhead just after Hinton that has "Scenic Route to Alaska" on it - Alaska's only something like 1500km away and I'm pretty sure that every route going that far is going to be scenic in some sense or other. This time we decided to try and get as far as we could towards Edmonton on the Monday of a long weekend without using the major roads - thereby avoiding the horrendous Alberta driving public at large and possibly seeing some neat stuff on the way.


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We had an awesome drive up through the secondary roads of the Alberta foothills, through ranche country (for some reason around the Calgary area they like to add extra vowels to words), past some really neat farms, seeing all kinds of animals both wild and domesticated, along some "interesting" sections of roadwork and detours, and with a fair bit of seat of the pants navigating, to within about 10kms of Edmonton all without using a major highway. It may have taken us an extra hour on the trip, but the lower stress levels, the interesting things we saw and towns we went through and then general relaxing nature of a trip with no real deadlines made it one of our best road trips ever. Here's to destination weddings and what comes after them!