I miss Matsuya so much

Banff was full of beautiful views, as usual.

Then we took the road to Vancouver, where the mountains were just as photogenic

And the hotels were just as classy

Banff

Of course we took T's mom to Banff, to show her that the mountains are even beautiful in the rain.And the tourists are friendlyAnd the hotels are so classy they're worth posing with
outside and in:

Oh Banff...

... will you ever run out of beautiful views?

Also, I would like to have to overcome the same obstacles as John Jaeggi: 

Happy Birthday, Mom & Dad!

They were legally required to add the word "Berry" so that at least one of the words made sense.

You bet!

I'm always looking for an adventure cool enough to prevent my mouth from closing. AMT had just the idea this weekend: A trip to Calgary via the Icefields parkway. Banff and Jasper were obviously built for tourists, who prefer that every aspect of their experience be mountain themed:
and constantly need to use the bathroom:Between the town sites, the Rockies were as beautiful as ever. I almost didn't recognize the Athabasca Glacier
probably because the last time I was there it was under somewhat less hospitable conditions.

We finally got to Calgary, where Steph showed us that strip mall pubs are much classier than they are in Edmonton:
Which did nothing to prevent AMT from becoming exasperated

Morale

When we discovered that our 16 combined years of post-secondary education were inadequate training for making a fire from damp wood in the dark, we went to bed cold, wet, and somewhat miserable. The next morning we discovered a magical secret (hint: you can light paper on fire!) that led to a dramatic increase in morale, and the most delicious instant ramen I have ever tasted:As you can see, we had a sort of live-off-the-land approach to cutlery. I had a good feeling about fresh twig chopsticks, but Vinai found more success with the chopsticks he pulled off of one of our logs: We were still in good spirits when we got to Lake Louise, where the typically majestic emerald lake turned out to be covered a more mundane layer of ice and snow.
Still it was worthwhile, since it made for this great snowman shot I took for Steve:
By the time we got to the hot springs things were back to being just plain lovely, thanks in part to sunshine and cucumber sandwiches:
Not to mention road signs advertising extremely bad ideas:
...and idyllic mountain towns like Golden, B.C.:
...home of the first Gurdwara in North America and plenty of intimidating wildlife:
All in all, a great day for morale. Unless you were driving, I guess, in which case it was kind of dangerous and unnerving:

Tanyas Win!

When you spend the day sightseeing in a scenic town with lots of your friends it's hard to pick even a small number of pictures for your picture-a-day blog. Somehow today the Tanyas knew just what to do, like when Tanya got Sullay's attention here:
or when Tatiana's face exploded due to puppy cuteness:

ACOL!

ACOL is a great conference that you should totally go to if you are doing linguistics in Alberta, as I'm sure most of you are.

Beautiful Mountains and Sh*t

Yeah, like, I'm really friggin' impressed. I'm going back to bed.

Blah

I'm too busy to take pictures today, so here's an old one of me in Banff being totally unable to climb on these railings. Anyway, the mountain is nice.

Wolf path

It wouldn't be a vacation if we didn't climb a mountain, so we turned off the path we were hiking on and went up here. You could tell from the footprints that no people had gone up here in a while, but a wolf had recently come down. Wolves shy away from humans, we heard, so we weren't worried until we saw this:
This was warm, wet, and pointed in the direction we were travelling. After conferring for a while, Katherine declared that it was probably just a small bear, so we kept going. We sang, just in case.

Sheesh

Eventually I got tired of taking pictures of unreasonably beautiful mountains, but this river was just too much.

Signs

Look carefully: For some reason, French speakers only have to climb 60 m, but English speakers have to climb 455m.
They really want us to read this.

Discovering Banff

I guess Banff exists today because some railroad workers climbed down a hole and found hot, stinky water. I don't know why they had to climb down the hole. It was all over the place, sending up steam, making baby trees look like signs from God.

Badaaaaaaa**

Alberta is very bright, so I had to buy these badaxx sunglasses for the trip. You can see the photographer if you look carefully.

Our room

This is the the view from the balcony of our hotel room. Notice how large the balcony is, based on how far back Katherine is. I won't even bother to show you pictures of the fireplace in the room, because then you would just get jealous.

Vacation!

Katherine has a job, which means she also has vacations. So, for Easter she drove us to Banff. Many more pictures to follow.

P.S. - I'm backdating these posts.