After yesterday’s mix of sun and cloud, today would turn out to be mainly sunny, but a little bit windy.  The plan for today was to leisurely enjoy Banff as we rest from the hike the day before.

Every year in Banff, we spend part of a day at the Willow Stream Spa at the hotel, and we had reservations for today.  After breakfast at the hotel, we checked into the spa for our treatments, and spent some time enjoying the relaxing water features before going into town to explore.

Shortly before leaving for our trip, Nadine and I watched the TV Show Burger Wars Banff.  We set out for the saltlik Steakhouse to try the winning burger from the show.

And here it is…

After a nice lunch, we explored the town to do some souvenir shopping.  Shown below is the famous Banff Avenue.

We stopped by the Banff Park Museum, which we hadn’t visited yet.  Unfortunately, it was just closing for the day, so we will have to try again tomorrow.  Instead, we walked along the river a bit before returning to the hotel for dinner (a light dinner–the burger at lunch was very filling).

Heading back to the hotel was a busy drive, and we got to experience rush-hour like traffic in the mountains.  I suppose that was to be expected since it was the Sunday of a long weekend.  Here is a shot of the traffic behind us on Spray Avenue as we make our way back to the Banff Springs Hotel.  I gather many weekend visitors who aren’t even staying at the Banff Springs Hotel drive out to see it.

We did, however, have a bit of entertainment on our drive back.  Below is a picture of an elk we saw grazing on someone’s front lawn.

Walking around back at the hotel, there apparently was a meeting of Porshe owners!  I don’t know where the hotel valet parked our rental Jeep, but it apparently isn’t among this group of fine cars.

Nadine and I returned to the Willow Stream Spa to soak for another hour or two before bedtime.

We loved our visits to the Canadian Rockies the past two years, so we decided to return for a third consecutive year.

In the past, our visits have been in mid-June.  While nice, June presents some challenges with deep snow on the hiking trails at higher elevations.  So, this year we decided on the first week of September, in order to still see summer-like weather, but hopefully without the crowds of tourists seen in mid-summer.  Our plan for this year was for 4 nights in Banff followed by 4 more nights at Lake Louise.

To make the most of our limited time, we were flying Business Class with Air Canada and our flight from Toronto to Calgary was to leave at 7AM.  After breakfast in the Maple Leaf Lounge, we made our way to the gate and boarded our plane for Calgary.  Due to some mechanical problems with our scheduled aircraft, we ended up having to deplane and eventually left about 90 minutes late on a replacement aircraft.  Our Airbus 321 was replaced with another aircraft of the same type, which meant all passengers retained the same seating assignments and boarding passes, likely saving the gate agents a lot of work and time to reissue new seats to everyone.  After the aircraft change, it was an uneventful flight and we still arrived in Calgary early enough to get our rental car and make our way out to Banff in the early afternoon.

The weather was rather overcast, but we weren’t planning on doing much on our first day anyway.  We checked into the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, our hotel of choice in Banff, and had the same suite as last year; #647 – the Nicholas de Grandmaison Suite.  We like this suite for its large size and beautiful views out over the Bow Valley, and were pleased the hotel was able to honour our request for this specific room.

The photo below was taken from our room, however, it was actually taken the following morning, as our first day here was mostly cloudy.

We enjoyed a nice lunch in the Rundle Lounge while waiting for our room to be ready.  After getting settled and freshened up, we headed down to Castello, which is our favourite restaurant at the Banff Springs.

While it started to rain outside, we had a fantastic meal inside.  After dinner, we returned to our room for the night.