Take a hike!

We will soon begin a 3,000 mile round trip journey to the Great White North to once again visit wonderful Banff and Jasper National Parks, doing our part to help support faltering energy prices.

While the laptop will be in tow, it will be used only sparingly - don't look for anything new here until the first week of September, by which time, who knows where the price of oil will be or how the financial world will look.

The image to the right is from the Lake O'Hara area in Yoho National Park (just west of Banff) and we may make a trip over there this time. We took quite a few day-hikes the last two times we visited in 2003 and 2006, but there are many, many more to go.

We'll get about $1.06 when we exchange our greenbacks on this trip - in 2003 it was about $1.34 and two years ago it was about $1.20. We were waiting until the dollar made a strong move back up before we returned in order to avoid the embarrassment that might result after we crossed the border and made a bee-line to the nearest bank.

Gas should be below four dollars as soon as we get out of California and it looks like it's only about $1.30 in British Columbia. Oops - that must be in litres. Over five dollars? Really? That's right, it was about four dollars a gallon a couple years ago and that seemed quite high at the time.

Here's the route (just as we prefer loop trails, we also like loop travel routes):
It should be an interesting trip and an even more interesting last four months of the year.