After the best night’s sleep since we have been here – ( We want to take these hotel mattresses home!), we got up really early, had breakfast and loaded the SUV with the cameras and headed out to Canmore. We had seen a drive around where wildlife allegedly could be seen.

Canmore itself seemed like a lovely town and we passed by the Mountie‘s station – Kim wanted to stop!! We found the graded road (Highway 742) and set off slowly, both sets of eyes peeled for wildlife…………….

After quite some kilometres up this bumpy road we saw something in the lake opposite the road but despite zoom lenses on Cameras and a huge zoom on the video, we couldn’t quite make out what it was.  We think it was elk. We continued…..and drove and looked and looked and drove……and eventually spotted a moose!!!! We stopped and managed to get some photos….another to tick off on our wish list of animals to see.

Despite seeing numerous signs that it was bear country and that bears were in the area, we couldn’t find one at all! We did find a strange little bird though, it looked a bit like a grouse, we will look it up and let you know.

Eventually after about 3-4 hours, our eyes were tired and tree stumps began to look like bears so we headed off in search of a coffee and a leg stretch.

One thing Kim had wanted to do was a helicopter flight and we found a facility that offered various flights and we decided that as the weather was nice, to do it there and then! We did a 20 minute tour of the Rockies and Kim was soooooo excited and loved every minute – she took over 100 photos (and usually she is the more conservative photo taker of us both!) and was grinning from ear to ear. Lewis captured the experience on video and we were both buzzing for hours after!!!

Back to the hotel to freshen up and then we walked into downtown Banff to Wild Bill’s Saloon where Kim had salmon with a maple b-b-q sauce and Lewis had Elk burger – and we both enjoyed a pint or two of the local beer!  We should say at this point that 2 pints each is probably about our maximum seeing they came to $24 plus sales tax of 5%…. Beer is certainly not one of the cheaper commodities in Canada !!!!