North America Road Trip - Happy Birthday to me!

Admittedly it was a few days ago now, but it was Rob's birthday on Monday.  Thanks to everyone for the texts, emails and happy birthday messages.

Surely on your birthday it would be nice to have a relaxing time, have a bit of luxury and just chill out for the day (after all, Rob's not getting any younger)?!?!  Nope, Rob decided that it would a good idea to go and have a look at a sunrise over Wild Goose Island. So there we are at stupid o'clock (5am!) crawling out of my favourite type of accommodation (you guessed it, a tent) to go and stand by lake to wait for the sun to do it's thing.  Then again, it's better than getting out of bed to go to work on your birthday!!

A very cool looking Wild Goose Island

The colours are starting to come through...

After the sun did it's thing we decided that we needed a bit of a birthday treat, so we drove to a nice hotel and treated ourselves to a massive buffet breakfast. We were pigs and ate far too much, it was honestly like we'd been starved for 3 weeks, all because the buffet had food that didn't come from a tin! We then couldn't actually eat anything else for the rest of that day - stuffed!

Feed me!

Mmm, nearly finished...

It was then time to cross the border (by car) into our favourite country, Canada.  As it turned out, it was really easy and didn't take very long.  No inspections of the car like we were expecting - we could have had anything in the boot!

So off we went to Waterton Lakes National Park where we spent the afternoon generally exploring and chatting with the rangers.  

A bit later on that day we spotted a bull moose in the marshes, a lot of people gathered and the rangers appeared to take control of the situation.  The nice ranger man happened to say "wouldn't it be funny if a bear crept up behind us whilst we're all watching the moose" .... within 5 minutes, it was like he heard us, a black bear appeared behind the crowd, it gave the rangers a bit of a challenge especially when the bear started running!  We didn't make this up - honest.

Rob's birthday treat was a night in proper accommodation - I booked it as a surprise, but really the treat was for me as I thought I might need a proper wash after being away from home for 3 weeks!! (joke!).  Ahhh, proper room = 1 happy Lisa!  Rob did enjoy the
room much more than the tent but he'll never admit it!

So where are we now.... we are well and truly in the heart of Canada and it has to be said, we feel very much at home.  We left Waterton Lakes after climbing one of the mountains (well for an unfit Lisa it felt like a mountain) to get a view over the townsite, we also had a chat with another roadside bear on the way.

We've stopped at Radium Hot Springs and are now in a one horse town called McBride, nothing really here except an Inn, some industrial units and tumbleweed!  Tomorrow we continue more of our drive to Hyder in Alaska and we will get to our destination on Saturday. We're hoping to see more grizzly bears this time fishing for salmon.  Rob's making me camp again when we get to Hyder and I am a bit scared that a big ole grizzly will want to share my sleeping bag.  It will be a bit chillier than the 30 degrees we've been experiencing lately.

Well that's about it for now, the weird thing is it seems longer than 4 weeks ago since we left home to start our adventure.  Maybe it's because we've done so much already? It does feel like we've been away for much longer and we still have 11 months to holiday!