Penny As Joe mentioned in the earlier post, we returned to Canada for a total of 12 days to attend two of our friends weddings. We also took the opportunity to see our families (including Vincent, the newest edition to the del Moral clan) and our friends who we missed so much. The break from…

Joseph You may be wondering why we stopped posting for a while.  Well, on June 19th we left the spice island of Zanzibar and started the long journey home.  We decided to take a 12 day interlude in our trip to attend weddings for two of our friends in Canada. Our friends Dan and Jo…

Joseph We’re a couple of days behind on our postings now.  We’ve been on trains getting from Vancouver to Sacramento where we are now.  I’ll put a short post here about the rest of our time in Vancouver and our visit to Victoria. In the evening after visiting Stanley Park (see post below), we had…

  Penny Being back in a big city after spending a few days in the Rockies is a very weird feeling.  One thing is for sure, meals are muuuccchhhh cheaper in Vancouver when compared to the town of Banff or Lake Louise.  Particularly, Asian food! We have been very pleasantly surprised once again with the…

Joseph When our horses weren’t busy kicking Penny they got up to a few tricks.  One horse in particular seemed very bright.  Watch the video I got of him actually untying a knot to free himself.  Should I send this to one of those funny video shows?

Joseph Whiskey Jacks are the very unshy birds that are all over the place here.  It is also the name of the hostel that we stayed at right after our adventures on horseback.  We made a silly decision to reserve the hostel knowing full well it is a wilderness hostel with few amenities.  By the…

   Penny As we had previously mentioned, we have been away for the past 3 days enjoying some horseback riding and some rustic accommodations.  We joined a guided trail ride that took us into the mountains around Banff and led us to Mystic Lake.  It all started Friday morning, when we went to the stables…

Joseph Sightseeing in the area around Banff had gone like this for us so far:  Pull up to lake/river/mountain, park car, get out to walk around and enjoy the views, be surrounded by other tourists.  Since the national park here receives millions of annual visitors I don’t know why I was expecting it to be…

Penny and Joseph Banff National Park is one of 5 parks in this part of Western Canada.  It alone is bigger than Prince Edward Island.  So, needless to say we are only going to be seeing a small bit of it. Today we did the obligatory drive up to Lake Louise, about 50 km from…

Penny We were up at 4am!  You would expect us to be excited about the start of our trip but I think that we were both still exhausted and unable to stir up much enthusiasm.  But as we said ‘bye’ to my brother Frank (who we stayed with last night) it finally started to hit…