Oh, Canada! – Honeymoon Recap Part Two

Welcome back to my honeymoon recap! If you haven’t read the first post, back it up and check it out here.

All caught up? Good. Let’s move on.

Thursday, we set off on our first adventure outside of the town of Banff—a zipline tour! I went solo because Ryan didn’t feel like doing it. It was awesome, though! There were 3 lines, and the last (and longest) took me over the Kicking Horse river—I snapped a photo of the waters on our way out.



We stopped to check out a stream with similarly lovely waters on our way back.

After the zipline journey, we ate at The Keg steakhouse, which was delish, then stopped in at a few stores we’d missed earlier in the week.

Friday morning we said goodbye to beautiful Banff and headed up to Jasper National Park to go on a glacier tour! We hadn’t driven on the road to Jasper before, so we saw many more beautiful (and snowier, since we were heading north) things:

Oh, and we also spotted a MOOSE! The whole trip I’d told Ryan how much I wanted to see a moose. Literally within 10 minutes of being on park ground on Monday, we’d spotted two bears, but by Thursday we’d yet to see a moose. So I was thrilled when one ran across the road in front of our car (a safe distance away, of course!) I took lots of pictures of her—she was antler-less, so we knew she was a lady:

The journey up was cool, but the glacier tour itself was even more awesome! We rode in these massive ice trucks that are specially made to travel on glaciers. There are only 23 in the world: 22 for the tour and 1 up in Antarctica to bus scientists from the airport to their worksites. We had a hilarious driver, Masami, who was kind enough to snap some pictures of us on the glacier itself.




This nearby glacier was our favorite view—it’s called the Andromeda glacier:



And here’s the ice floe that spills down onto the glacier. Behind it, the Columbia Icefields stretch out for miles and miles and miles. When we first arrived on top of the glacier, it was snowing, which made it hard to see the floe, but then the skies got bluer! Masami said we were lucky to experience both snow and sunshine on top of the glacier—an earlier tour group hadn’t seen much up there due to the snow.



After the tour, we headed out of Canada. Just as he was there to greet us, a black bear emerged to salute us on our way out:



I was very sad to be leaving Canada, as it was incredibly beautiful! :( But luckily, we had two more days of honeymoon ahead of us, this time in Whitefish, MT. We decided we wanted a day to unwind after all the driving and sightseeing we did in Banff.

We spent Friday evening driving and arrived late, so Saturday was our first real day in Whitefish. First we ate lunch at La Hacienda in downtown Whitefish. Montana doesn’t exactly have the greatest Mexican restaurants, but this one did NOT disappoint! The salsa was the best chunky salsa I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant. Ryan got his customary cheese enchiladas, while I tried a combo with a soft taco, chicken enchilada, and beef tostado. Mmmm.


After lunch, we hit up a slew of antique shops and thrift stores, and of course I came away with some incredible finds, but since this post is getting rather lengthy, I’ll be sharing all our honeymoon purchases with you tomorrow! But here’s one of the stores we visited—isn’t that yellow desk darling?

Saturday night we had dinner at the Tupelo Grille. A $75 gift card to the restaurant was actually included in our hotel package, which rocked. We split the bacon-wrapped shrimp as an appetizer, then I got the chicken and dumplings (SO. GOOD.) and Ryan had chicken marsala. We also received a bread pudding on the house, but we were so stuffed that we took it to go and ate it back at the our hotel, the Hidden Moose Lodge :)

Speaking of Hidden Moose, they really spoiled us. Along with dinner, we also received champagne, an assortment of chocolates, and a lovely floral arrangement that we got to take with us! And the Lodge itself was so lovely.

Come Sunday, we hit the road back to Missoula. All in all, we had a majorly fun time on our honeymoon! The weather was wonderful, the scenery was gorgeous, the food was amazing, and Banff wasn’t super crowded, so we never had to wait long for a meal or an activity! We anticipate that we’ll go back someday, maybe even with our children :)

Oh, and just for kicks and giggles, here are a few “outtakes” from the vacation:

Stay tuned for Fab Finds: Honeymoon edition! I actually managed to snag some of the items on my Thrift Wish List that I shared last week :)