We arrived in Vancouver on the 13th, Sunday. We started early in the morning, carried all of our stuff over to our BnB in KItsilano. It was a pain in the neck to do that. Took us 10 hours to get from Victoria, to the farm to get all of our stuff, go back to Victoria, up to Swartz Bay, over to Vancouver, two buses, one train and a km of walking until we arrived. Each of us had three backpacks with him. Anyways we arrived at 6 in the evening, went for groceries and cooked something. We invited Ali over. I don´t know if I mentioned Ali. Ali was on the Damali Lavender Farm with us. She arrived two days before we left, we got along really good. Unfortunately she left the farm early because of private concerns. Anyways, we had a great evening together.
On Monday I had a phone call with my parents, took care of lots of orga things and in the evening Mario and I met with Niklas. It was nice meeting u again buddy. We went o Gastown, had a beer in a restaurant and headed to the English Bay where we stayed almsot until midnight. We took the bus back and went to bed.
Now I am sitting in the living room and write on my blog. Probably gonna go for a run later one, cook something and prepare everything for our depature tomorrow. We will get up early to pick up our retnal car in Langley, go back to here, pick up all our stuff and head to Whistler. Looking forward to my last two weeks in Canada. Road Trip with Mario to Calgary through the Rockies. I guess we will have an amazing time!
Wednesday: ROAD TRIP START! We got up at 6 and left the BnB at 7, it took us two hours to get to Langley. We picked our car up and arrived at our BnB around 10:30am. Put everything in the car and headed to Whistler. About 2 hours drive north. Before arriving in Whistler we went for a hike close to Whistler. Brandywine Falls is an easy, 5km long hike with nice trails and a beautiful waterfall. Was great. Afterwars we headed to Whistler and were looking for a shelter fort he night. We haven´t booked anything in advance, just easy going and living day-by-day. We booked a motel for 1 night, cozy and cheap. In the evening we got some dinner and went to the pool – yes… we have a pool included. Nice room, two beds with pool 30€ each, not bad 😊 Tomorrow is a lazy and not that interesting day. Long Drive to Kamloops and thats it 😊… mostly;)
Thursday: Got up at 9 and packed everything together. We lef the Motel around 10 and went for a walk in Whistler. A beautiful little city. In 2010 the Winter Olympics have been here. There are still a lot oft hings related to this in the town. Further we´ve seen a lot of Mountainbikers. Whistler is mostly a tourism city, but because it is summer and Covid it was not busy at all. Of course there is summer tourism, but the winter tourism is more importatn for the city and it is much more busier at that time. Anyways, around 12pm we left Whistler and headed to Kamloops. The 4 hour drive was exhausting, but at the same time beautiful. The Sea-to-Sky Highway goes through the mountains, along beautiful lakes and incredible views. A lot of curves, I felt a bit sick, but the views made me feel great, still. We arrived around 2:30pm in Liloelet, had some lunch and drove on to Kamloops where we arrived around 5pm. I guess this was the longest car drive that we will have on our whole trip, I am happy that this one is done. More exploring, hiking and stuff like this will come from now on. We bought some dinner and went to the pool in the evening. We booked a really cheap motel for this night. Bedtime at 11pm😊
Friday: Got up at nine and explored a bit Kamloops. Honestly I don´t like Kamloops. The nature around it and all the surronding small moutnains, they do look a bit like an old western. Everything is really dry, kind of weird. In Whistler, evreything was green and weh ad beautiful nature around us. 250km further north and into the direction of Alberta, everything is dry and looks like an old western. I felt a bit like in one of the Winnetou movies, which my fathers loves so much. When we arrived in Kamloops, I was really excited, becasue I thaught it would has the vibe of a western city, maybe even the architecure of a western, but it was disappointing. Kamloops, a 90.000 inhabitants city, doesn´t offer a lot. Maybe we just didn´t spend enough time here to explore the greatness of it, but I was disappointed. Nothing that looks like western or that matches to it´s surronding nature. Anyways, I am still happy to see even bad cities or cities that I don´t like. That´s how I get to know different cities, cultures, natures and just the fact that I don´t have to come back to this place one more time. Around 12 we moved on to Clearwater. We booked a White Water Rafting Tour for 2pm in advance. We arrived there at 1:45pm. The building wasn´t open, no lights on, just nothing. We checked our confirmation again and realized that we made a mistake. We booked for july, luckily we were able to cancel it and get the whole refund. We´re probably gonna do White Water Rafting in Banff now. We decided to drive to our Campground, because Mario didn´t feel that good and he wasn´t in the shape for a hike or something else. In the evening, we built up our tent and just relaxed around our camp fire:) The best thing about the evening was our dive into the lake next to the Campground. Probably the warmest lake we´ve been in since I came to Canada. We also spoke to some of our RV neighbours, cool evening.
Saturday: We planned to get up at 8, so that we can start the ifrst hike around 9 and maybe we would have done a second one. When I woke up, it was pooring rain down on our tent, I said to Mario: „Let´s stay in our tent, let´s just do one hike, let´s watch Germany aainst Portugal and hope the rain will stop.“ Around 11am, after the soccer match, it was still raining, but not that bad. We packed everything together and went to the Moul Falls. A nice hike close to Clearwater, well, actually the hike wasn´t great, it was more boring than cool, but the 35m Waterfal at the end was great. We were even able to walk behind it. I got undressed and went a bit closer 😊 Directly after we went back it started to poor rain again, so we were soaking wet when we arrived at our car, even though we had our great rain cotes with us. Anyways, it was 2pm and we went on our 2 ½ hour drive to Mount Robson, where we will stay one night on another Campground. Excited about the next days, hopefully the weather will be great, fingers crossed;) Ok. Nevermind. We arrived at Mount Robson and the weather was so terrible that we decided to keep on driving to Jasper. It just didn´t make any sense to hang out the whole evening in the car or the tent and if the weather would stay like this, then we wouldn´t do anything in the morning. We arrived late in Jasper and were lucky. We got a cheap hostel for the night.
Sunday: First full day in Jasper. I am excited. Getting up, going out and being directly in the Rockies. Amazing! Mario and I slept until 10am. We checked out and went for our hike today. Moor Mountain is a 6km, 680M elevation hike, 20km south of Jasper. We arrived there around 12, saw some wildlife on our way there and started the hike. We arrived after 2 hours on the peak, it was a really tough hike. Up there, we realized that we went the wrong mountain up. Too bad, but the view was still amazing. Anyways, after spending some time up there, we decided to hike back down and arrived at our car at 4pm. We headed back to Jasper, bought some groceries, checked in our Hostel for the next three nights and cooked something. I took care of some stuff and we headed to bed at 11.
Only 12 more days in Canada. Excited about the rest time together with Mario. Especially about tomorrow and the day after. Two long hiking days in Jasper😊
Canada Work&Travel 