Maureen Bush

Hotel Adventures

We just spent a couple of nights at a favorite mountain retreat that shall remain nameless as we love it and don’t want to slag it. But we have some good stories…

We arrived to little piles of poop on all the window ledges. The guy who came to clean up figured it was a chipmunk who had slipped in with the cleaners, and then was trapped inside and looking for a way out. He came back with a flashlight to make sure the little guy was really gone.

We met the chipmunk and his buddies later, begging for food as we sat on the porch. We didn’t feed them, at least not intentionally. One of them stole Mark’s cookie when he left it unattended for a moment. (I shared mine with Mark after).

We asked about bear activity (thinking about hiking over the next few days), and were told, “There hasn’t been a bear on the property for a couple of weeks.”

On our first morning Mark had a bath in the lovely claw-footed tub, opened the plug and heard water pouring onto the floor. He mopped up with towels while I washed at the sink, and the maintenance guy came back to hook up the tub. We thought we’d escape from plumbing problems while we were away.

But it’s a great place, and we had a lovely time. Mark took the photo from the rock pile at Moraine Lake.

Maureen

Three Bears

Another trip to the Rockies. We saw at least a dozen deer, at different times, a cluster of mountain sheep (accompanied by a serious bear jam and people way too close), and three black bears.

We drove up to Lake Louise for the first time in summer in years. My first glance at the lake left me thinking I could walk across it. Then I remembered it wasn’t frozen. The glacial till that makes it milky also stops the eye from seeing down into the lake – that’s my excuse for imagining it frozen, anyway.

Highway construction is grotesque – stretching for miles and miles (I guess that should be kilometres and kilometres, but that has no flow at all), through the highway twinning project in Banff National Park, to the major roadwork around Golden. This is all desperately needed to make the highways safer, but in the meantime . . . sigh.

We visited a lot of lakes. Our favorite was  . . . oh, maybe I won’t share that. It was delightfully quiet.

Maureen