One of my personal goals during my two years term in US is to visit the Canadian Rocky, so I successfully persuaded my friends to make Calgary to be our final destination of our US road trip in Canada! After potato adventure in Idaho, our group reached Spokane in Washington, at first we planned to visit Glacier National Park, but after got a telephone confirmation from a park ranger that the famous Going to the Sun was still closing, my friends voted unanimously against my original plan and decided to change for shorter route directly to Banff, what a miserable day.

By a super fantastic GPS in our car, we drove for 9 hours and reached our hotel in Banff almost midnight! No surprising that next day the only thing I wanted to do was leisurely walking in the city for nothing. I really enjoyed Banff; the city’s surroundings were just amazing with dreamy mountains especially on sunrise and sunset. On the way to Jasper by the scenic Icefields Parkway, we saw the famous Lake Louis and Lake Peyto, these two lakes were stunningly beautiful, the mountains were again magnificent at its best and the lakes were equally impressive with unbelievable turquoise color. We decided to have lunch at Fairmont Chateau Hotel; the food was equally excellent with the view. It was my dream to take photo at Spirit Island at Lake Moraine. The island was again such a beauty place on earth, no wonder of its reputation. Visit the area in late spring was quite a problem, some small roads were still inaccessible, and our GPS always took us to those roads making the trip more complicated.

We spent only three days in the Banff-Jasper area, even though during the road trip we saw many stunning mountains and lakes like Grand Teton and Sawtooth, the mountains and lakes in Banff and Jasper National Parks were much more impressive and make us wow in every turns of the road. Coming from the very flat country like me, Canadian Rocky was one of the best places on earth to provide a definition of what mountains should be. We ended the exciting two weeks road trip at Calgary Airport; the only regret for me was that I saw only 2 World Heritage Sites from 5 in my original plan, but that’s the charm of the road trip, and really made me want more road trip to discover the natural wonders of this continent.