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 :)

I Got Sunburned in Canada – Honeymoon Recap Part One

Last week, the hubs and I went on our honeymoon in beautiful Banff, Canada and Whitefish, Montana! We were married in January, but since we both had to head back to school a week and a half after the wedding, we elected to delay our trip until spring semester wrapped up. Ultimately it was a good choice because it meant that nothing else was on our minds—and the trip kinda felt like a celebration of the end of the school year, too!

We kicked off the trip by driving up to Banff from Missoula on Monday, May 14. It’s an 8 1/2 hour trek, but it’s so incredibly scenic (and costs much less than flying and renting a car!), so driving was worth it. We split up the driving, so I wasn’t snapping pictures the whole way, but here are just a few of the lovely things we saw on our journey up:

We arrived at around 8:00 PM and checked into our hotel, the Banff Caribou Lodge & Spa. We had some pretty nice digs, including an amazing Jacuzzi bathtub that was for some reason in our bedroom (?? But it was still awesome).

 

Then we walked downtown, stopping to dine at Earl’s. We both ordered cocktails (a mango/strawberry/raspberry margarita for me and a mojito for Ryan), and enjoyed steak (Ryan) and shrimp & crab linguine.

 

On Tuesday we strolled around downtown and checked out the shops, which were mostly tourist-y stores, fancy clothing boutiques, and a few art galleries. After shopping and eating sandwiches at Coyotes (yum!)…
  

We rode the gondola up to the top of Sulphur Mountain and saw the most beautiful views of Banff and the Bow Valley!

 

We also saw a small herd of mountain goats. Signs forbade us from feeding them (or high-fiving them?)

Here’s what the gondola itself looked like. (By the way, I didn’t know this when I started to take the picture in the upper left, but the people going by in this car were definitely making out. It appears that the guy realized I was taking a photo and broke away from his lady before it could be captured. Haha!)

Oh, by the way, I definitely got sunburned on Sulphur Mountain. Not an intense I-need-to-soak-in-a-tub-of-aloe-vera burn, but a noticeable one. Only I could get sunburned in Canada. Though we’d been warned that it would probably be chilly in Banff, we actually had pretty great weather all week—temperatures were in the 70s on most days, and we only had a tiny bit of rain! Most nights I was warm enough in a dress and cardigan.

Back to Tuesday…after I received my sunburn atop the mountain, we decided to sample some local beers and a Canadian classic, poutine! For those of you who don’t know, poutine is a pile of French fries topped with gravy and cheese. Before last week, I thought it sounded kinda repulsive, but was willing to shell out some bucks to have a Canadian experience.

Well, I can now report that it was DELICIOUS. I’m converted. We felt so authentic as we munched on poutine and watched a hockey game. (P.S. everyone at the bar was so into the game. Also there are commercials for hockey on TV that are very similar to our football commercials). In addition to the poutine, I had a bison burger & Ryan had meatloaf, and we split a delicious brownie sundae.

Speaking of Canadian things, we took a few pictures of food items that made us giggle. CheeCha puffs? Cinnamon Toast Crunch in French? Ketchup flavored potato chips?

And the bathrooms are all called washrooms! 

Speaking of washrooms…remember how our bathtub was in our bedroom? Well, I had a few issues with it. When I took a bath on Tuesday night, I guess I added a few too many bubbles and left the jets on a little too long. So the bubbles threatened to overflow into the bedroom:

This photo was taken post-freak-out, when I called Ryan up to try and help me turn of the damn jets! The bubbles were covering the buttons up, so I had to blindly poke and prod until they finally shut off. It was hilarious after, but during we were both worried the bubbles were seriously going to overflow and ruin the carpet or something. Phew!

On our third day, Wednesday, we ate more sandwiches from Squish:

Visited Bow falls:

  

Went on a scenic drive up Mount Norquay, where we found more goat friends and spectacular views:

Stopped by the Cascade waterfall to snap a few pics:

 


And went on a cruise on Lake Minnewanka, Banff National Park’s largest body of water (although it is a man-made reservoir, it’s still cool):



At the very edge of the lake, you can actually see where the Canadian Rockies end. It’s called Devil’s Gap:



For dinner, we hit up the Grizzly House for (expensive but yummy) fondue. It was very low light in there, so it was hard to photograph the food—but we shared a cheese and bread fondue appetizer, fruit fondue dessert, and a meat-y main course featuring beef, elk, bison, venison, lobster, and five delicious dipping sauces. Instead of cooking the meat over an oil-heated fondue pot, we actually used a super hot stone tablet.

 

Okay, y’all—I still have three more days to cover and this post is already massive. So come back tomorrow for more on our honeymoon :)