Meg's & Lon's Magnificent Adventure: Travel Day: Lake Louise to Toronto (Via Vancouver)

The last of the Lake Louise photos are here - a big thank you to the Lake Louise staff who are just beautiful and a big hug goes out to Roger who entertained us with his acoustic guitar and wonderful voice and many 'hoot n annies' - oh and of course some of the amazing stories he told us!! We will miss Lake Louise and it's absolute beauty.

Ice sculptures at night by light

The detail on this one was amazing - individual scales

Amazing teeth

What more can we say - MOOSE

They are pretty big sculptures - even the small ones

Our new spot in front of the fire

Baileys Hot Chocolate and Fire - what more can we say??

Hot Tub at Deer Lodge

With lovely view

Ever present steam

Elona's favourite vista

This is called a snow garland!

This is the deer from Deer Lodge - he was finally dug out by George!

Acoustic guitar and mandolin

Fun times with Roger!

Bless his cotton socks!!! He has some great stories

This poor bugger has antlers that come down his nose!!

Unhappy Goat

I'm not sure the exit sign came with the deer??

Better view of the poor bugger with the antler over his nose!

In light of the travel conditions (should say avalanche conditions) we decided to catch the early bus back to Vancouver. We originally were to catch the 10.15am from Lake Louise, this only allowed us 2 hours to get from the bus station to the airport and then on a plane at 11.30pm. Given the 39hour unexpected journey to get to Lake Louise we erred on the side of caution.

The wonderful staff at Deer Lodge arranged for us to be driven down to the bus stop in time to catch our bus at the spectacularly early time of 2.05am. In true Greyhound fashion we embarked on our journey at 2.50am. It was a lovely wait in the quiet and closed village of Lake Louise with snow gently falling.

Finally on our way, we quickly made ourselves comfortable and fell asleep, with the expectation that if we made it to Revelstoke (our previous journey's 12 hour delay) we would be well and truly on course to arrive in Vancouver with about 10 hours before our flight was due to take off.

With a brief scheduled stop in Golden, and no sign of road closures, we then slept through to Revelstoke. Yeah, we arrived without incident. Change of bus drivers.

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting....... Bus breaks down. DAMN

New parts on the way though ETA unknown.

Waiting Waiting Waiting..... Change buses. The driver called an old friend who drives for one of the local hockey teams and organised to borrow the bus until will could change to a Greyhound bus in Kewlona .

Now 3 hours behind schedule, we are back on the road. In an effort to make up time and enable passengers to make connecting flights and buses, we were unable to stretch our legs or even leave the bus for nearly 5 hours - BRUTAL.

We eventually arrived safe and sound in Vancouver. The next step was to navigate public transport and find our way from the bus depot to the airport. Surprisingly easy. 2 fairly quick trains we were checking in at the Air Canada desk for our flight and then settled down for the 4 hour wait until we were due to depart.

Air Canada then successfully transported us to Toronto and we arrived at the Delta Chelsea at 7.30 am and by a miracle we were able to check in straight away - excellent sleep time.....

Due to being way behind on this blog and the fact that Toronto is lovely but just a city like Brisbane we are going to cut this one short and just show some photos and continue on with Quebec our next stop.