Overnight, my Airbnb place for Vancouver cancelled on me too. Now technically, unlike the previous ones, they didn’t accept it first before cancelling it, it was just pending for many hours until the person woke up I guess, but money was still transferred and then refunded. It was a very strange listing anyway, they have four units listed and all four were available but she just cancelled with a note that said “Refund”.

I should have named my blog series Unjilted Jaunts so that that booking stops getting jinxed. It’s not all that bad though, besides the entire ordeal taking up time, I learnt a couple things and made a new friend.

So the second Vrbo booking that got cancelled last night was someone named Joseph who said he had a booking from Airbnb already, and I mentioned some of this in the last post already but he offered me his living room couch for $50 a night if I was stuck in the end. He also helped me research some alternatives, and although the first one was the one that cancelled this morning, he checked in with me again this morning just before the person cancelled (oddly coincidental), and then helped me research a second listing. This one was almost the same price as the original Vrbo one, and the person accepted almost instantly when I booked it, so that was nice.

I thanked Joseph for all his help and told him that the next time I come to Vancouver I’d look for his listing to see if it were available. He gave me his number and said that if I contacted him directly he’d give me a better rate. He said that he was fairly new to Airbnb himself too (but found it better than Vrbo) and found it all very interesting.

The other thing that happened around this was that the escalation agent at Vrbo contacted me back and quoted a “Book with Confidence” policy or something, and from that he offered a reimbursement up to 50% of the original purchase price, past the original purchase price, if I were to book something more expensive. This meant that I could book a hotel or something reliable that wouldn’t cancel on me, and even if it was more expensive, they would cover (reimburse) the first $138.65 past the $277.30 mark, the latter number being the original price for the initial Vrbo cancellation. I wish they had come with this offer a day earlier instead of trying to make me book another location that fell flat again — since I was already on vacation I didn’t want to wait an extra day or two for resolution and had booked that second Airbnb already. But it was still really nice of them to do (as I would essentially have been able to get about a $400 hotel for $277) so I’ll at least take them off my blacklist. Until the next time something like this happens again!

I also wanted to highlight this giant Christmas tree outside my bedroom window in May. Specifically it’s right across from my bed, so whenever I look up I see this lit tree in front of me. I actually like this quite a bit. In the night, with the lights on, it looks like this across the foot of my bed:

And at 4am last night, taken from right near the window, it looks like this:

Anyway the rebooking thing happened in the morning, and that plus me staying up late to finish the previous blog post and taking 4am pictures meant that it was late in the morning already by the time I was ready to leave the hotel. Today was Banff Day on my itinerary, and I actually had a hike lined up to do, but since I still hadn’t eaten, I decided that I was not going to do that hike and would pick a shorter one instead. Which one exactly I had not quite decided on at this point.

The bus from Canmore to Banff cost $6 one way. There technically is a transfer option if you returned within 90 minutes or so, but I was going to be there for a lot longer than that, so two tickets for me. I bought them using the transit app that the Canmore/Banff region uses, but it looked like there was a physical ticket dispenser in Banff itself so maybe I should have tried that for the return ticket. The ride itself took about 20-30 minutes so really the transfer would just have allowed one to spend an hour or so in Banff before the transfer expired.

Arriving in Banff, the weather was nice but a little bit overcast. Supposedly there was a chance of showers later on in the day as well, which was another reason that I didn’t want to do my original long hike since I had arrived there late. But this also meant that the burning sun wasn’t out, which was also very nice. For now, I basked in the awe-ra of the looming mountains and took pictures that thousands of other people have taken over the years.

I needed food, and wandered my way into an interesting little mall called the Clock Tower Village Mall. It wasn’t very large at all, basically just one short passageway with shops along the side, but it also had a little honour-system library just in front of the front door where people could “take a book, leave a book” or borrow something to read and return. The ambience wasn’t bad, and I ended up eating in here at a little eatery at the back called Jugemu.

Jugemu is a character from a famous Japanese rakugo story, which amused me (and the four animal totem pole on the right was from Town Musicians of Bremen), but more importantly rice bowls were slightly discounted during the lunch period, so that appealed to my frugality. I had a BBQ Pork Belly rice bowl, and the pork belly was so ridiculously nice and succulent.

While eating, I also plotted out my replacement hike for the day — I decided that I’d just climb a small mountain called Tunnel Mountain that was adjacent to Banff itself and apparently is the smallest official mountain in Banff. It was so close to Banff that it took mere minutes to walk to it from the middle of town. So once lunch was done, I followed along a couple of scenic roads and reached the mountain’s lower trailhead at around 12:55 pm.

The climb was slow and painful — even though I had climbed another taller mountain before, my life these days is mostly sedentary and this one would prove to be quite the challenge, with a mandated rest stop after every climb segment. In fact, my legs didn’t hurt at all (until much later in the day) and wasn’t my limiting factor here, but instead I was panting a lot and that led to me starting to feel woozy. The bag I was carrying was heavy, largely due to my huge portable battery, and that weighed me and my soul down as well as I continued to trek upwards. I did figure out after a bit that i could mitigate some of the panting and the wooziness by maintaining a proper hiking postures and not letting either the bag or my posture compress my lungs as I walk though.

But still, this ascension took forever, and while I did take a bunch of pictures on the hike up, most of them are either pictures of random forest or poor versions of the same scene of the Banff townsite and a couple of mountains past it. The best one probably was this one:

Or maybe this one:

There were two or three points that allowed a view of this “back” side of the mountain, but not many. Notably, even being at the top of the mountain later on did not provide a better version of this view, as trees were in the way.

About 3/4 of the way up, there was this nice rest point that was a bunch of smooth flat rocks in a mini plateau like area.

That family pictured in the photo consisted of a husband, wife, two girls, one wee little boy, and a black dog, and the reason I mentioned this is that I basically walked a little bit behind them all the way up to the summit and then they happened to ask me to take a photograph of them, and then we also left at about the same time and went down more or less together. Even though they had a little kid who couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, they still outpaced me going up as well as going down! That’s how slow I was going.

But also notably, I saw this little cairn on the way up:

And one of the kids knocked it over on the way back down! How rude!

Just below the summit, there were a couple of red Adirondack plastic chairs installed there by Parks Canada (local).

A few feet past that were two signs proclaiming my victory over this baby mountain:

Tigey took pictures with both!

And from the summit, this was the main view that everyone was rewarded with:

I took several photograph variations of that scene as well as pictures of other people taking pictures of that scene.

This squirrel or other squirrel-like rodent was running around the place:

Notably, it ran up to this woman who stretched out her hand to it (she wasn’t feeding it anything, it was a spur of the moment thing):

I liked that picture quite a bit, so I actually went up to her and showed her the picture, asking if she wanted a copy of it. She said yes, and the entire mountain including the peak had cellular coverage, so I emailed it to her on the spot.

That squirrel and another one raced around the area a couple of times, but thankfully neither of them went for Tigey when I brought him out to start taking pictures. You know how people like to do poses for their Instagram feed or whatever where they’re staring off into the distance, away from the camera behind them? Yeah. Tigey wanted those.

I also have a picture of the dog that was with the family I mentioned earlier. I believe his name was Prince, from overheard chatter, though I might be wrong.

Funnily enough, while on the mountaintop, I received an email saying that my plushie from Makeship, which I had mentioned in my planning post, was just delivered to my home. I quickly texted Jon who said that he’d try to get down there later and see if they left the plushie outside my door, and would bring it in if so. We’re time skipping a bit here, but Jon never found the plushie even though he visited it only about 3 hours or so after the alleged delivery. By the text of the delivery notice, he thinks it’s inside the Canada Post owned and operated shared mailboxes, with the key to it in my own mailbox, but this was delivered by one of those independent courier services and I’ve never known them to be able to access those mailboxes, so I am worried that the plushie just upped and walked away (or that someone took her). We’ll see though once I get back — Jon didn’t have a spare key for the mailbox to check, only spare keys for the front apartment building door and my own apartment door.

Back to reality. I lounged up there a while before noting the dark clouds in the area and remembering the potential rain warning from earlier. I started to make my way down, and found another spot to snap a picture of the back view from the mountain on the way down.

I mentioned that one of the family’s kids had knocked over the little cairn (that I had photographed on the way up) on their way down, but a bit further on the way down I found a much larger cairn that I had overlooked coming up.

Too big for them to kick down!

The family went down a lot quicker than I did, but I saw them at the carpark in the upper trailhead of Tunnel Mountain, which opened up into roads that winded its way down the mountain and eventually into town. I had walked here through the winding, inclined path that connected the upper and lower trailheads though, so I continued walking down to the lower trailhead, which basically put me right at the edge of the Banff townsite proper.  The moment I reached the bottom of the trailhead, just as I was stepping past a couple of female park workers who were shoveling sand away from the bottom few steps of the trail at around 3:40 pm, I felt the first raindrop. Oh no.

A very light drizzle developed as I walked into town proper and headed for the central shopping district area. My legs were jelly, as coming down took a lot more leg strength than going up since I was trying not to lose my balance and tumble down some slopes. I didn’t need to stop for breath on the way down at all though so the whole thing was quick. These were the nice, long roads that led right into town from the bottom of the trailhead:

I reached the main downtown area just in time to catch this incredulous (to me) picture of a wall of rain rushing in to drench everyone in the area.

I hope no one was stuck up on the mountain in the ensuing torrential rain. There was even a very little bit of hail mixed in. Because I had managed to stumble back to town in time though, I took cover under some awnings with a bunch of other people, and the worst of the rain was over in about 10 or 15 minutes.

I dodged between shops and awnings and headed over to a shop that I had planned to visit on my itinerary: Jolene’s Tea House. This was a tea that I had picked up from Sunterra Market a couple of weeks ago, and it came in a box that looked like the front of the actual shop. Well, I liked both the tea and the box, so I had to go do a pilgrimage to the flagship shop itself.

Very cute. I went in and chatted to the clerk and eventually came out with a can of looseleaf tea and another tea house box.

There are eight different kinds of tea that are sold in those tea house boxes, and Sunterra carries all eight, so there was no reason to actually come here for those. I think the looseleaf ones aren’t sold anywhere else though, at least not anywhere I remember seeing them at before, so after sniffing at a bunch of sample tins I picked that one. I also picked up that tea “pot” thing on the right, it looks more like a coffee pot (or a scientist’s beaker) than an actual teapot though but it has a strainer built into its lid too, and I liked the look and (assumed) utility of that pot. The shop attendant said that he liked it too, and how it’s used is that you just dump the loose leaves and hot water into the pot, and then pour the tea out through the strainer once it was done. Just like you can with some teapots that have built-in strainers, but a lot more compact. Will try it when I get home! If the mug survives that long!

Out of curiosity, I also asked the guy at the counter who Jolene was, and learnt that she was the owner of the store, a celebrity in town as a member of the famous Brewster family, and a former Calgary Stampede Queen. Wow! What a resume.

I continued wandering around town after that, passing through a mall called Sundance Mall which was a very small and disappointing mall spread over three narrow floors.

I’m sure to some people the place was lit though. Cannabis stores next to a tattoo parlour, what could go wrong?

I crossed a couple more roads, heading back to basically the middle of town, where I found an actual, small REIT-style mall called Cascade Shops. I was surprised. As far as I could find, even Canmore had nothing like this (it barely even has any indoor mall areas at all that I saw, despite being many times bigger than Banff), yet Banff did for some reason.

It even had a food court below!

I was attracted by this because I wanted to find something cheap to eat in Banff, and I figured this would be an expensive food day because Banff is very much a tourist town, but nope, really cheap food here, barely a street away from Banff High School, where all the inbound buses stop.

It was still a couple hours away from dinner time though, but I did sit down at one of the food court tables here and even nodded off a bit. When I got up, I visited the Dollarama that was also in that basement level of the mall, and bought some Gatorade Zero there, as I was almost completely out of water in both the water bottles that I had brought along. Then I went out and found this throwback store:

An IGA! Since they got bought out sometime ago, most of them have gotten renamed (to Sobeys, I think) and no longer exist in Edmonton. But here was one in Banff. Also are those the Parks Canada Adirondack red plastic chairs outside the store?? There were two of them here too, the other one just offscreen to the left of the above photo.

Even though this was a different grocery store altogether, the inside of the IGA reminded me very much of a Safeway, mostly because the price signs, including the discount price signs, were exactly the ones used in Safeway stores. The prices were fine but not great. They had a build your own meal section at the deli, which was neat, if seemingly pricey for the quality.

I also boggled that they put all the sriracha chilli sauce bottles in the frozen section while leaving packaged meat out in the open.

After that, I was really tired and my legs were still jelly so of course, I went out walking along another trail, this one within the Banff town itself. It stretched along the riverbank and allowed me to connect with nature without having to go up and down steep inclines. I quite enjoyed this walk even though it was a bit chilly from the rain still. Rivers are almost as amazing as mountains. And a lot less easier to walk alongside.

I had walked part of this trail with Ran before, I think, and was appraoching a bridge that I remembered visiting with her as well, but then I saw these fine Canada Geese hanging out by the waterside and had to watch them for a bit.

They were all just standing there and staring out in the same direction, watching the waves go by. They must have known something, because after a minute or so of watching them, I felt droplets of rain again. Oh no! I abandoned the rest of the trail and hurried back into town again, again reaching the network of awnings and dodging in and out of clothing and gift stores as the torrential rain returned for one last deluge.

Once it subsided a bit, I headed over to the mall and went to eat at that food court. I picked the Yan’s Bistro store there, because I noticed that even though they were priced like a Chinese fast food place with food trays, they didn’t actually have food trays set out, and instead had a cook on hand who cooked dishes as they were ordered. Kind of like other popular chains like Edo or Thai Express do. This also meant that I had to wait 20 minutes for my food, but I had lots of time anyway since it was raining outside, and the food turned out to be quite good.

That cost $15, and only because I asked to replace the rice with noodles, otherwise it would have cost $13.50 instead. Great, cheap price for Banff, especially for something located right in the middle of downtown, and yet it was a fairly substantial helping and tasted quite good too.

The rain had stopped by the time I finished my meal, so I went up to catch the bus back to Canmore, snapping a few more standard downtown pictures while waiting for the bus and admiring the way the clouds move in front of that one mountain peak in the background. The rest of the evening was uneventful, just the way I like it!