Hope you all are well! Its been scorching hot here in Texas! Makes me miss Canada much more. Oh wait, you didn’t hear? We went to Canada… for 2.5 weeks… and we drove… 5400 miles… I don’t know what’s more exhausting, telling you guys about this Epic trip or the drive! We called this trip #canada2k19
Let me tell you about it…
This idea spawned on us over a year ago. Laena and I had been trying to figure out where our next big trip would be; the only criteria being somewhere that required a passport! We thought about going to Europe, New Zealand, etc but since we had never been overseas we thought Canada would be a great introductory out-of-country trip. Needless to say the idea paid off- Canada, to put it simply, was breathtaking! We were huge fans of many YouTube personalities in the Canada area such as Peter McKinnon, Becki and Chris, Chris Hau etc. We would catch small glimpses in each of these videos of this illustrious wonderland called Banff. I was for sure that the blue in the water and landscape were all lies and PHOTO SHOPPED! Well one night we were eating dinner and we see a few shots of the famous Lake Louise pop up on the telly and I tell Laena, “THERE!, I want to go there next!”. We start planning out our trip with the goal to see the famous Lake Louise and beautiful Canada landscape.
Don’t want to spoil much but it was images like this that inspired the wanderlust to see Banff and Canada
One of the things we love doing is camping and exploring and as we research Banff more, the more motivated and crazy we got with ideas. So with diligent research it seemed the normal travel plans on the internet are people will fly into Calgary, rent a car, drive to Banff and stay at a hotel in the town. BORING!! We wanted to drive there and camp in the gorgeous parks so that we aren’t restricted by anything. Also, we got spoiled by using a roof top tent to camp with and we definitely wanted to be able to camp to really get the experience. After some research on Banff we decided to add Jasper to the mix as well. A few weeks more of research passed and we decided since we are driving let’s just check everything in west Canada out (or at least as much as we can). So our plan was to leave Frisco, TX, drive to Calgary, Jasper, Banff, Vancouver, then Seattle, Portland and head back to Texas. In the end we decided to skip out on Portland due to time. Feel free to play with and check out our route we drove on the map below!
First leg of the trip had us crossing the border in Montana to Canada and exiting Canada from Vancouver at the Peace Arch crossing to Washington. We decided after visiting Calgary it was best to leave for Jasper as it was further north and the drive to Vancouver required us going south towards Banff anyways.
So maybe my eyes are naive but this trip looked easy according to google maps. Everyone said that even a month isn’t long enough to visit Banff and Jasper and that couldn’t have been more true! We planned 2.5 weeks for our trip since it was the longest Laena could get off work. I will tell you right now that wasn’t enough time as we had so many things along the way that we would’ve loved to see and missed out on due to our timeline for the trip.
So…. Did we actually drive there? Where did we stay? What did we do on the trip? All great questions but I don’t want to bore everyone with a long blog post.
Catch us in the next blog posts and we will fill you in! We will have all the tips and tricks in case you’re crazy enough to take this challenge on.
As always, thank you everyone for the support and ideas for keeping this blog awesome!
Check out what I shoot with! https://dhophoto.com/blog/my-essentials