The Road to Canmore

I know I never finished my Montreal story but it just feels like really old news now so I’ll just give you the short version. Emily and I were in Montreal for about two weeks, and while it was a nice city in a lot of ways, it wasn’t what we were looking for. We got by just fine using English and my broken French but we didn’t really feel at home or at ease a lot of places because of the language barrier. If we were going to be there long enough to learn the language it might have been an interesting challenge/opportunity, but that wasn’t in the cards. Also with summer fast approaching we wanted to be somewhere with better outdoorsy experiences nearby.

While I was in Las Vegas, Emily was looking into short-term rentals elsewhere. She ended up finding a good deal in a town called Canmore near Canada’s Banff National Park. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pricey, but the place is pretty sick and we’re in an amazing area at the height of the season, so I do feel like we’re getting what we’re paying for, which wasn’t really the case in Montreal.

The next question was what to do for a vehicle. It’s a long drive from Baltimore, where we’d parked our stuff during the WSOP, to Banff, and she has a bad back that does not appreciate long drives. We looked into shipping the car but given that we’re only going to be here for a few months, the cost of renting the car was about the same as shipping ours. We ended up flying to Seattle, renting a car, and then driving up into Canada and through the mountains on the Transcontinental Highway to Banff.

There was no trouble at the border. Emily even said something about working online (to explain our ability to spend months in Banff), but thankfully that didn’t trigger an irrational “work permit” response the way it apparently did for Jungleman. The only things they made us do were throw away our apples and show them our bear spray, and they were very friendly about that. It almost makes me feel bad thinking about the attitude the US Border Patrol probably has towards visitors versus how friendly the Canadians have generally been with us.

Anyway we didn’t get too deep into Canada on our first night. We did stop off for a short hike through some old railroad tunnels. The “light at the end of the tunnel” metaphor was just too good to pass up as I drew nearer to resuming my online poker career.

By the second we were in the thick of Canada’s Glacier National Park. We camped that night just a short walk from the ruins of Glacier House, a Gilded Age-era grand hotel built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad as a high-end tourist destination. As cool as it was to drive up through the mountains and into the park, I can only imagine how amazing it would have been to take a train from Montreal through hundreds of miles of wilderness and probably scenery that you’ve never seen anything like in your life and then to arrive at this really posh resort just kilometers (I’m learning the local dialect!) from a Glacier.  Rumor has it that they planned the train’s schedule such that it passed over the most harrowing precipices at night, when passengers would be blissfully unaware of  where they would be headed if the train derailed. At it’s height the resort had 90 rooms, 3 fountains, a grand dining room, a bowling alley, a billiard table, and I even found this picture suggesting a poker game:

Of course it doesn’t seem so romantic when you think about what a small segment of the population had access to this kind of splendor and what kind of poverty many others lived in to make it possible. Just as one example, a map detailing the ruins of the hotel indicates both “Servants’ Quarters” and “Chinese Servants’ Quarters”.

At CAD$30/night, camping is certainly a much more democratic way of making this splendid place available, though I still felt very privileged to wake up surrounding by towering evergreens rising up hundreds of feet all around me. If I looked way far up, much further than I’m used to looking for the horizon, there were puffy white marshmallow clouds floating through crystal blue sky and snow-capped peaks a bit further off in the distance. It’s so surreal to step out of a tent and see that all around you and realize that you are just in this place, that you slept here and now you’re going to have your cereal and coffee here and then brush your teeth here and all around you is some of the most amazing scenery you’ve ever seen. It’s almost not scenery anymore because you aren’t just seeing it in a picture or through your windshield you are walking in it and listening to it and breathing it.

We were there just the one night, shipped out yesterday morning to drive the rest of the way to Canmore. Along the way we stopped for about an hour at Lake Louise, a milky blue glacial lake surrounded by green and white mountains. This seems to be one of Canada’s most popular tourist destinations, and it was absolutely overrun by people (this was also a beautiful Saturday on a long weekend in summer, so probably about as bad as it gets). Many of them came by car or bus, but some were staying at a hotel there that I believe also dated back to the railroad era but is now owned by Fairmont and substantially renovated.

Our arrival in Canmore was actually a little anti-climactic after all this scenery. It’s a beautiful place in its own right, but it’s quickly getting swamped by condo/resort/timeshare complexes like the one we’re staying in. I was looking forward to showing up unshowered, unshaven, and generally poor-looking and confirming with the front desk that we’d be staying for a month, but to her credit the woman at the desk wasn’t the least bit biased by my appearance or smell. Canadians are so friendly… and clean… and they really do so “eh?” at the end of every sentence!

By a coincidence that, if you think about it, is merely surprising rather than astonishing, another American member of PokerStars Team Online turns out to have relocated to the exact same complex. We’re neighbors! Kevin “WizardofAhhs” Thurman is one of the only PSTO’ers I’ve met in real life but also one of the ones I’d most like to get to know better, so I’m excited to have the opportunity. He’s from Texas and tells me that although he’s barely seen an inch of snow in his life, he plans on staying through the winter. Me, I’ll likely be gone come October (hopefully with a WCOOP victory under my belt!), though where next is still very much up in the air.

For now, I’ve settled into a nice routine of poker in the afternoon and walking in the evenings. Tomorrow we’re going for a longer hike to an alpine meadow, so hopefully I won’t get eaten by a bear and will have more great pictures to share soon.