gulf coast to canada roadtrip
we drove 7,500 miles in three weeks, this is what we saw
10 States
New Mexico / Colorado / Wyoming / Montana / Alberta, Canada / British Columbia, Canada / Washington / Oregon / Idaho / Utah
9 National Parks
Rocky Mountain / Grand Teton / Yellowstone / Glacier / Waterton Lakes / Banff / Yoho / Jasper / North Cascades
18 Waterfalls / 21 campsites / 3 showers / 13 cans of food / 5 hot springs / 8 bears / 3 Moose
This was honestly the roadtrip of a lifetime. We've been dreaming of driving to Banff, Canada for years (our good friends the Minors would remind us to go every time we planned a different trip) so we finally buckled down and decided to do a three+ week road trip this summer! It was pretty overwhelming to plan an itinerary knowing we'd be camping in a new place every night, not to mention the crazy amount of must-see stops we realized were on the route! We ended up buying a camper on day two of the trip (in Denver!) because if there's anything to know about Callen, it's that he is hyper-aware of every single camper and piece of climbing gear for sale on craigslist anywhere in the country at any given time. Although, now that we have a camper, I'd imagine he is zeroed in on climbing gear (if only I could convince him to troll skydiving rigs for me!).
Three days before we left for this trip, I was at Skydive Spaceland 6 jumps shy of my A license and prepping for a big wedding we were shooting in Houston the day before we left. I could barely think about what to eat for dinner, much less the massive road trip we were about to embark on! But thankfully, we thrive on big days and I earned my A license on Friday, we shot the wedding Saturday (with a hurt foot from skydiving! yikes!), packed up and left Sunday, and I'm proud to say that I still delivered that wedding well within my promised turn-around time ;) The camper purchase was a key player in our sustainability of energy during the trip. I'm convinced we would have been so much more exhausted if we were setting up a tent or moving stuff around in the car every night, but no! We just pulled up to each campsite, unhooked the trailer, set up the pop-up tent and crawled in to our comfy full-size bed. Life is good!
This trip was so much fun for us. We saw so many amazing places, had amazing experiences and met amazing people. I even got to skydive in Chelan, Washington and Moab, Utah! It was pretty hard coming back to Texas and now every time we step out in to the 108 degree heat, we dream of the high of 55 canadian rockies and shed a few tears (that might've been a tad dramatic) but seriously, Canada knows how to do summer. I'll be posting specific photo-heavy blog posts for each area we visited, but I wanted to put together an overall preview of our trip. If you have any questions about locations for any of these photos, feel free to comment and I'll be happy to answer!
