In March, 2004, we took a three week vacation to Canada, primarily to see snow. We did. But, as it turned out, that was a year they had the least amount of snowfall in over 25 years. The bonus that that was the roads were all clear. The mountains were gleaming white against blue-bird skies.

We flew into Calgary and saw the city sites and the old Olympic venues, then took a bus to Edmonton where we stayed at a motel across the street on the north side of the Edmonton Mall – the world's largest at the time. Even if you are not a shopper, this is a must see place! Over 300 shops of every description imaginable and some not so imaginable! A five acres lake has full size replica's of the three Columbus Ships, a full sized water park with mega-slides and wave pool, a full sized hockey rink, and a carnival mid-way with roller coasters and Ferris Wheels --- all under one nicely heated roof!

From Edmonton, we took the train to Jasper – the heart of the Jasper National Park. Our motel was across the street from the train station and had roof top hot tubes were we relaxed at night among the gently falling snow flakes. We were there about a week. We rented a car and covered most of the Park and Ice Fields.

Back in Calgary, we rented another car and headed to the Lake Louise area. Along the way, we visited an Ammonite Mine and Linda has some very nice rare Ammonite jewelry now. The area between Calgary and Lake Louise holds the worlds largest deposits of fossilized Ammonite.

It was hard to take a bad picture on this trip – even in harsh light. Unfortunately, all of the pictures were on film and/or on an early digital camera. The digital files were only one megabyte in size, and the negative film was digitized by the processor to only 350 to 400 KB's. While I do have all of the negative in storage and a new scanner that will digitize them to 20MB files, the pictures posted here will not make enlargements in excess of 11X14 and that is pushing it. All the pictures were tweaked in Lightroom to optimize them for viewing.

This is a trip we hope to do again – now that I have much better photographic equipment and knowledge.