We woke up early --- today was the day we'd have to drive to Lake Louise, which was a 3 hour drive, but I'd also wanted to visit my cousin Connie, who'd had a baby during the pandemic which I haven't seen. We packed everything into the car and drove North, moving along empty roads that definitely reminded me of scenes from The Last of Us TV show. Around Calgary the speed limits increased but so did traffic, and we arrived at Canmore around noon.
We ate brunch, took a photo to satisfy both her mom and my mom, and I had to do laundry, so we took a short walk near her house in between laundry starting and having to move clothes to the dryer and then hung out in their hammock-equipped backyard while waiting for the dryer. Sean had a dream job with Garmin, and apparently if you're a Garmin employee whenever you go to trade shows the equipment manufacturers shower you with free stuff, so he also had an extensive collection of bikes.
We drove on to Lake Lousie Inn, where we checked in, made use of the swimming pool (which Boen was looking forward to --- the Waterton Lakes hotel had no swimming pool) and had dinner. While having dinner I realized that we needed to rent hiking sticks and the outdoor store was almost at closing --- so I walked to the outdoor store and rented sticks for $9/day. I had noted upon arrival that the Lake Louise parking lot was marked full, but after dinner it probably wouldn't be full, so we went.
Lake Louise was much more crowded than I remembered, but the last time I was there was in 2010, and I had arrived for dawn photos in the fall so it was probably not comparable. The wind coming off the mountains was intense, and we knew we were scheduled to do the Plain of the Ten Glaciers hike the next day, so we took photos got a good sighting of the parking lot and the parking lot prices, and I told everyone that we'd have breakfast up here the next day so we could get a decent parking spot the next morning.
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