Monday, February 04, 2008

Banff trip....




We had planned a lovely trip to Banff for the day after Neil's graduation (details of that event to follow soon)and we were all really looking forward to a relaxing weekend with a bit of skiing and some nice walks with Sebastian around the shops in Banff. Things took a turn for the worst during our journey down there. There was an incident involving some gum being spat out onto the car window during some extremely bad driving conditions which resulted in us ending up in the ditch just outside Cochrane. Myself, Neil and Seb were in the Audi and Gordon, Toni and Philip were in the Land Rover following on behind us. I take responsibility for the gum-spitting that inadvertantley caused Neil to take his eyes off the road for a fraction of a second...just enough time for our slick summer tires to catch the snow at the edge and pull us into the ditch. Sorry Neil, I'll never do it again I promise but please can we get some winter tires??? xXx



We were all OK, Sebastian slept through the whole event. Some kind passers-by stopped and tried, unsuccesfully, to push us out. One guy was even pushing the car with his bare hands in temperatures of below -20 and everyone was sinking to their knees in the snow.



Eventually we hooked the car up to a tow rope connected to the good old Land Rover and she towed us out with ease!



In the ditch.




This is Neil trying to maneuvre the car back out of the ditch whilst being towed by the land rover. The Wheels became so full of compacted snow that the whole car shook the rest of the way to Banff.
After quite a few tries we were eventually rescued.






Unfortunately that wasn't the end of our bad luck. When we finally arrived at our hotel they had mixed up our booking, they had us booked for the 9th of Jan not the 19th! We didn't get the nice suite Neil had booked and our group ended up in separate rooms all over the hotel. We were really lucky to get a room at all in Banff in January. The manager was very nice and arranged for us to have an upgraded loft suite the following night which turned out to be lovely but things got worse still.....poor little Seb became ill, he got his first ever cold and really wasn't happy at all. We got very little sleep that night and I spent the whole of the next day in the hotel room with the poor little man. Neil and Philip did manage to get a day's skiing in but we left earlier than expected the following day to get Seb home.


Philip on a cold mountain top in Banff......




and thawing out in front of the fire back at the hotel.

No comments:

EMAIL ADDRESSES


ralstne@gmail.com