Non-hiking day in Banff

Today we slept in.  We grabbed breakfast at Summit Cafe in Canmore. Nice little cafe, very relaxed and good food.  We did a horseback ride around the Spray River/ Bow Falls area.  My horse was named “Mountain”, they definitely matched each horse with the size of the person.  Feeling a bit insulted, but whatever.  Deb's horse was named "Misty" or something girly like that. It was a nice ride around the wilderness (and a golf course).  Fun fact, did you know that after riding a horse for an hour or more, your leg might fall asleep?  I discovered this as I was descending the mountain(aka dismounting).  So for us tourists, they out a little step on the left side of the horse.  You first put your left foot on this and the swing the right leg over.  When I did this I discovered I had no control over the dead weight that was my leg.  Nearly knocked the 120 pound girl who was spotting me right on her ass.  I might have flattened her if I didn’t have ahold of the saddle with my hand.   So a nice peaceful ride through the wilderness ended with a bit of an adventure.

So anyway, we decided to drive around for a bit, nothing really planned the rest of the day.  We decided to do the Mt Norquay chair lift, on the way up we saw several bighorn sheep on the side of the road. Unfortunately, when we got up there they told us a storm was rolling in so the lift would be closed for a few hours.  So we did the Vermilion Lakes drive, which was a bit different than other areas of Banff.  It was actually a flat drive and there were very few people around the lakes, I think we saw at most 10 people.  We did try to find the source of the thermal spring that feeds the lakes (and keeps a large part of them from freezing all winter).  But that turned out to be just some smelly water in basically a roadside ditch.  But it is a nice area and as I said,  very quiet and secluded.  

We headed back up to the Mt Norquay chair lift, but now we were too late as it was closed for the day. We did see a bear on the mountainside there. This would turn out to be the only bear we saw on the trip and it was about a half mile away.  We saw 2 more sheep on way down, so that was kind of cool.  We once again did not have a reservation and free-lanced a restaurant for dinner.  We ended up eating at the bar of Park Distillery right in the middle of Banff. We both had steaks, they were pretty good, as were the drinks.  Also, we appreciated the efforts of them to get a chair with a back for Deb as the barstool was not good for her.  I think they actually brought one up for storage in the basement.

All in all, it was a good relaxing day, except for my stumble down the mountain.