In August, just before school started, my family and I took a trip to Banff National Park in Canada for a week. When we were in the car, driving to the airport, my mom got an email saying our second flight was delayed. We a let out a huge sigh of frustration. Nobody likes waiting at the airport for a long time. When we got to the airport, we said goodbye to our grandparents and waited in so many long lines until we got to our terminal. Our flight was about two hours. Then, we had a stop and we got back on for four more hours.

When we finally got to Calgary, a city next to Banff, we rented a car. We rented a Tesla because my mom really wanted to try it out. Soon, we all got mysteriously carsick and my dad was getting pretty confused on how to drive it so we drove all the way back to the airport and got a different car. By then, it was very late and we still had to drive two hours to get to our hotel in Banff. We didn’t have time for dinner so we just picked up pizza. We arrived at our hotel at around twelve AM and my brother and I were asleep.

The next day, we were all tired from our long night but we did a few hikes at a lake called Lake Minnewanka. This lake was a beautiful turquoise color and we did a beautiful scenic hike that had plenty of clear views of the lake. The whole time, my dad was taking continuous pictures with his new camera. He claimed he was doing this for the memories but I think that he just wanted to test out his new camera. A few days later, we went to YoHo National Park and visited a lake named Emerald Lake. This lake was a crystal turquoise color and was the most beautiful lake I had ever seen. We did a beautiful scenic hike there. Along the way, there were little stops with a little bit of beach. You could hang out on the sand and swim/wade in the lake. I really wanted to swim but the lake was WAY too cold.

This was one of my favorite things we did on our trip: In the afternoon, we went to a waterfall called Takakkaw Falls. There was a short hike to the waterfall and we got DRENCHED since we were so close to the falls. Some other hikes we did were at Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. Three days before we left, we decided to drive through the Icefields Parkway. It takes three hours to get completely through it. After about an hour of driving, my little brother started screaming, “BEAR! BEAR! BEAR!” Sure enough, when we turned our heads, there was a black bear on the other side of a river. We pulled over and we took some pictures.

About an hour later, we came across a stop. This stop was a short hike to a view of a glacier! We went up and took a few pictures with the glacier but it was so cold! My brother and I saw that there was a path straight to the glacier and that you could walk on it. We begged our parents and they agreed to do the hike. We started walking and soon, we came across a sign that said, ‘Warning, only guide groups allowed’. My brother and a shrugged and we kept on going. My brother saw a very tall cluster of rocks and went and climbed it. My dad shouted for him to come down because one wrong step and he was dead. Next to that pile of rocks was a deep canyon with nothing but sharp rocks at the bottom. When my brother had gotten down, we continued our journey to the glacier. There was no path, just slippery rocks, guiding us along uphill. There was very little space and one wrong move and you would be tumbling down with sharp rocks into an ice-cold freezing lake. This lake was all the water from the melted glacier so it was definitely cold. We finally got to the glacier and got to walk on it. After a little while, we hiked back down to our car and soon, we were back on the road.

About an hour later, we reached Jasper National Park and spent the night there. The next day, we drove back to Calgary and stayed in a hotel that was five minutes from the airport. We were leaving the next day and needed to stay at a hotel close to the airport. Unfortunately, we had to wake up at 4:00 am because our flight was at 6:00 am. When we woke up the next morning, we hurried to the lobby with our luggage and waited for the bus (that was going to take us to the airport) to arrive. The bus finally arrived, but the driver was taking his sweet time getting us to the airport. We finally got to the airport and had less than an hour to wait in the lines to get let on the airplane. By the last line, we were really panicking. We were going to miss our flight. When we finally got our passports checked, we had five minutes until the airplane left. We ran to our terminal and got into the airplane with only 1-2 minutes to spare. After our flight, our grandparents picked us up and we finally went home. This trip was one of the best trips I have ever been on and I 1,000% recommend it to ANYONE. Thanks for reading!

Down below are some pictures that were taken by my parents: