The rain continued today, but not as heavy as yesterday.  We went into town for breakfast and to explore the local shops.  Our activities are basically limited to the town of Banff due to the area road closures.  We visited some local shops, toured a museum, and had lunch before returning to the hotel.

In the early afternoon, the weather cleared up and the sun came out, so we went for a short walk in the area.

This is the Spray River where it meets the Bow River, just in front of our hotel.

Here is the Bow River near Bow Falls.

After checking out the river, we walked back up the hill to the hotel.

We came across these curious ground squirrels, which seem to be everywhere.

Once back at the hotel, we went to the Rundle Lounge for dinner.  As usual, the food was excellent.

We still don’t know when the highway will open, or how we will get to the Calgary airport on Monday to meet our flight home.  As a worst-case option, it sounds like we may be able to get up to Lake Louise and head west to Vancouver.  However, that would be a 10-hour drive, and dropping the car in a different city, plus the cost of some last-minute airline tickets, is not going to be cheap.

Heavy rains have caused flooding and mudslides in south-eastern Alberta, which means we’re stuck in Banff for now.  The highway east to Canmore as well as west to Lake Louise has been closed.  Our flight home isn’t until Monday, so hopefully crews will be able to get the highway open before then!

I don’t have much to report for the day.  We spent most of the day at the fabulous Willow Stream Spa at our hotel.

Originally, we planned to spend Friday at the spa, but we moved our appointments to Thursday due to the bad weather forecast.  Of course, with Friday also now expected to be rainy (although not as bad as Thursday), it probably didn’t matter much.  Anyway, if you’re going to be stuck in a hotel anywhere, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is probably a good one.  The spa here is great.  Nadine and I each had 90-minute treatments, and we spent the remainder of the day using the pools and steam rooms.

We left the spa around 5 PM to prepare for dinner, but once back in our room, we watched a helicopter rescue some people by the river on the golf course in front of the hotel.  Below is a video of one of the rescues.

There are at least 10 different restaurants in the hotel, and we had reservations for dinner at the hotel at The Banffshire Club.  We spent the evening enjoying a very nice meal.

Hopefully tomorrow the rain will let up enough so we can get out and enjoy the outdoors!

If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve probably heard about the heavy rains and flooding in the Canmore, Alberta area.  Don’t worry, we’re OK here in Banff, but are pretty much stuck at the hotel due to the nasty weather outside.  Since there was nothing to do outside in the rain, we spent the day in the spa at the hotel (originally scheduled for Friday).  Supposed to be more rain tomorrow, so we’re hoping we might get outside again by Saturday, but even that isn’t looking great.

For now, the highway is still closed between Banff and Canmore.  Hopefully it will be open again in time for our flights out on Monday!