Jet lag is still with me. Woke at 5:30 (which is the normal time now). ENough time to do nothing in bed and get up around 7. Shower and breakfast. MAking some sandwiches for the tour today.

Karen is at my place at 8 and brought coffee. Nice. On our way to the meeting point she stops at her old university where she was a professor. She has a geocache there. Had some trouble finding it (all the wrong places) but with her help it works out in the end.

Now to meet Robin who will be our driver today. She waits at a shopping center where we change cars and start our drive towards Banff National Park. The landscape is all planes and in the distance, you can see the Rockies. That is our destination for today. A short stop at a Travel Bug hotel to drop off some stuff, before we continue.

We are going the backroad and not the main highway. We see a lot of sheep which are wild and you are not supposed to stop. So photos are taken by driving by slowly. A lot of mining and concrete industries here. The weather is not a good as yesterday. A little bit of rain is falling.

The National Park takes an entry fee. First cache in the national park is the goats eye, a small hole in the top of a mountain. This is my cache with the biggest elevation so far. Over 1600 meter. Next stop is the Banff National Park’s cave and basin. There should be a cache her, but it might be gone for the winter. We go down to a place for bird watching and see some fish which someone has put there many years ago and which are still inhabiting the water. Totally wrong place for these fish.

The cache we want to find is somewhere in the bushes. So we go off the normal path down to the water. Crossing some ice to an “island” we fight our way towards toe cache… wet feet included. But we might have taken a wrong turn. We have to give up and return. Across the ice again. Robin first, Karen after that and I step on a piece of Ice that is not solid. My foot goes down to the ankle (the water is not deeper than that) and my hone drops into the water. Wet foot and luckily a phone that is waterproof. This was the plan all over. Leave the foreigner in the woods and get eaten by wild moose or bears or beavers.. 😀

Back to the foul smelling basin. There is an Earthcache there – unless you die of the smell. Back to the car and the plan is to get on more Earthcache, then to g to a golf course and look at an elk (the road was closed, so no elk), and the Bow river falls (Instagram magnet for people). We take a short stop in Banff, which is the main town fr the tourists. A lot of shops. I get a beaver tail. That is a fried pasty that looks like a beaver tail and was in y case topped with Nutella and banana.

Now it is time to start the 150 km drive home. Robin delivers us to Karen’s car and Karen drives us to a Japanese restaurant, where we have dinner together with the family of her son. Tasty food and I didn’t have to eat fish. Good options with meat and vegetarian food.

Back home I start packing, write some postcards and translate the names of birds in a German bird-book for Karen. A great and fun day comes to an end. Tomorrow is a travel day.