Chapter 9: Jasper, B.C.

I feel the need to give a little geography lesson before explaining this trip much further. For those of you living in Utah, Calgary is pretty much straight north. From there, Lloydminster is 5 hours northeast, right on the border of Alberta and Seskatchewan (sp?). Like driving from Provo to Rexburg. From Lloydminster, Bonnyville is about 2 hours northwest. Then from Bonnyville to Slave lake is about 7 hours west. From Logan to Las Vegas. From Slave Lake we drove to Grande Prairie, which is another 5 hours west. From there to Calgary is 8 hours if you take the direct route, so back to Logan from Las Vegas with a pit stop :D If you wanted to go the more adventurous route, it took closer to 11 hours. BUT you had the chance to drive through one of the prettiest national parks in Canada. Jasper is right on the border of Alberta and B.C., which puts it just below Grande Prairie and just west of Calgary. We decided to make a road trip of our journey back home, so we drove through Jasper instead of desolate western Alberta.

We left around 1 p.m. on Sunday in a mini caravan with Richard's sister's family. We had 3 walkie-talkies, and that made it a lot more fun. We told jokes, sang goofy songs, and played "name that movie from the quote" the whole way home. It also made deciding where to stop for dinner a lot easier. We got to Hinton, which is where Burt's office was the week that Jay was covering for him, and stopped at a Boston Pizza. Boston Pizza is a fancy Pizza Hut that wants to be Chili's. Pretty good pizza, but way too expensive. We stayed there for like two hours, which was a nice break for the kids and Rachel before we got back in the car.

Rachel liked being out of the car far too much to go back to sleep when we got going. She screamed for about 45 minutes before I couldn't take it anymore. I pulled off the road and everyone else went a little further to a turnoff where they said there was a sign for a waterfall. I drove to catch up after feeding Rachel and we went on a little hike. It was so cool! The waterfall was amazing, but I was shocked at how little fencing there was. You could walk around whatever flimsy chain link they put up, and there were some other groups of people that were clear out right next to the water where it dropped down into a gorge. I was about to be sick it was so crazy. But it was beautiful, and we got some great pictures. It was a nice break to keep the babies awake just before bedtime, and the rest of the trip went really well.

Driving through the park was amazing. I really regretted driving, since it didn't allow for many great pictures. I was holding my camera the whole time and trying to snap random good shots without really looking. I managed to get some good views of the mountains and rivers and even some of the wildlife, but you really just had to be there. Every few seconds one of us would say "Woah! Look at that! Hey, look to the left! That's amazing!" It was just such an incredibly beautiful place, and I'm so glad for the circumstances that let us see it, however retarded they were :D

After the waterfall we drove through the glacial area of the park. Wow. I just can't even describe. Entire mountains that were formed by ice, and were still covered. You could see from the shape of the mountains where the huge glaciers had slipped off to form the river below. At one point we just had to stop and turn around. There was a beautiful lake that we could drive almost all the way around to get close to an amazing glacial formation on the other side. Rachel was asleep by now, and luckily she slept the rest of the way home.

As we neared Alberta we drove through a huge construction zone, which added another hour onto our trip. But all was well when we got home to our bed in Calgary. It was so weird and so great to be back. We were all really excited to see how well the reps would end up selling in the area that Graham's guys couldn't sell in.