Day #3 was another slow/easy/late start and I let everyone sleep in again, we’re on vacation after all. Once everyone was up, showered and had some snacks for breakfast we headed to the public transport station to figure out how to take a bus to Lake Minnewanka.
About 7 minutes into our 20 minute walk, I realized that my youngest son was wearing Crocs and no socks. It was about 40°F. He is still wearing a knee brace for his sprained knee, which is still bothering him if he overdoes it.
Luckily my oldest son is 16 so I sent him back to the hotel room to get socks and hiking shoes for my youngest son. Once back at the hotel room, he texted me to ask if I wanted a plastic bag to put the Crocs in so I could put them in my backpack and not get everything dirty . This was a good idea, but I really didn’t want to haul around a pair of Crocs all day. So I declined the offer, and told all of the children that we were going to hide the Crocs in the woods. 😂 They thought that this was a fantastic idea and picked out the perfect spot between a large rock and a tree. Sorry, not sorry.
Once we finally got to the transport station we had missed the bus that I had intended to take to Lake Minnewanka and the next bus did not arrive for another hour. However, the queue for the bus to Lake Louise was right next to the queue for the bus to Lake Minnewanka, and that bus was leaving in 20 minutes. Lake Louise is an extremely popular tourist destination while Lake Minnewanka is less so. Tickets to Lake Louise were sold out, but I had learned that there were some walk-on seats available. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take the chance of standing in line to get walk-on seats and then stress about trying to get walk-on seats back to Banff. That was really the biggest issue: I did not want to get stuck at Lake Louise, it’s a 40 minute drive from Banff. But the way it worked out, I figured we could wait in line for 20 minutes for the bus to Lake Louise and if we didn’t get on that bus, we could just walk over to the line for the bus to Lake Minnewanka. As you might’ve guessed from the title of this post, we made it on the bus. We got one seat and three standing room only. We let my youngest son have a seat so he could rest his knee. My older two teens and I stood on the 40 minute bus ride. And I would call this “active standing” as we really did not want to fall over into any of our new friends on the bus.
We didn’t stay at the lake very long just about a half an hour to take photos. My youngest son can’t hike on his knee so it was basically just to see the beautiful turquoise water of this famous lake.
We had more snacks for lunch waiting in line to try and catch a bus back to downtown Banff. We made it on a return bus with only about a 30 minute wait, and this time we all got seats so we got to enjoy a gorgeous bus ride through the Canadian Rockies.
Once we were back in downtown Banff, we were on a mission to try a beaver tail treat and purchase a souvenir for my mom.
We ran into my husband during a teambuilding exercise that was just wrapping up, so we grabbed him, took him to our favorite souvenir shop and then we all went out for an early dinner with happy hour pricing at Añejo Restaurant.
There’s even a special Mexican mayonnaise for tacos! 😂 My oldest son said it was really good! I’m not a huge fan of mayonnaise to begin with so I was really done with the condiment at this point in the trip. My aversion to mayonnaise stems from having eaten eggs every single day of my first pregnancy. I was obsessed with eggs. As soon as my son was born, I could not stand the smell of them. For several years, I couldn’t even cook eggs without becoming nauseated or sick. I swear I can kind of taste the eggs in the mayonnaise. At home, I buy vegan mayonnaise.
After dinner, we all walked back up to the hotel telling each other stories about our day. We retrieved my son‘s Crocs, still hidden between the tree and the rock. The kids and I tried to go for a swim in the pool, but it had closed early for a Canadian national holiday, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. My husband went for a teambuilding dinner/bowling night and the kids and I watched Toy Story 5 before bed.
My husband is done with his work engagements tonight, so he’ll spend tomorrow sightseeing with the tween/teens and me.
Tomorrow is our last day in Banff…
