We went on Tauck’s Alps and Dolomites tour in 2015. The tour would ultimately take us into Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Liechtenastein. We flew into Munich and arrived a day before our tour was scheduled to begin. Before we left home, I had booked an independent tour to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. Our guide met us at our hotel and then accompanied us on a short train ride and bus ride to Dachau. A tour of Dachau has…
The Banff Springs Hotel was our ultimate destination of the day. The hotel was originally built in 1888 by the Canadian Pacific Railway. The idea for its creation is credited to William Cornelius Van Horne, who was the president of the CPR. He is said to have stated, “Since we can’t export the scenery, we will have to import the tourists.” The original Banff Springs Hotel was a wooden structure and was damaged by fire in 1926. The current building…
The next night we would stay at Banff Springs Hotel. Along the way, our first stop was to see Athabasca Falls which is within Jasper National Park. Athabasca Falls is in the upper part of the Athabasca River – we had gone rafting on the lower part of the river during our stay in Jasper. While the water doesn’t have the greatest drop, it is considered a powerful waterfall because of the amount of water funneled through relatively narrow openings…
We left Lake Louise and headed for the Jasper Park Lodge via the Icefields Parkway. The Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks are a UNESCO World Heritage Site both because of their beauty and fossils that can be found in the area. Our drive took us into Yoho National Park, Banff National Park and Jasper National Park. The drive was one of incredible scenery with snow-covered mountains, glaciers, beautiful blue lakes colored by glacier sediment, and waterfalls. The next pictures were taken…
My husband and I woke up early in Kananaskis and took a walk after breakfast. We were treated to beautiful views and saw a doe and her fawn on our walk. And then we were off to Lake Louise, but with some incredible stops along the way. One of those stops was Emerald Lake which is in Yoho National Park in British Columbia. The lake was named by Tom Wilson, a Canadian guide, who found it by accident in 1882….
We took our first Tauck tour, the Best of the Canadian Rockies, in 2009. We arrived early so we could explore Calgary and chose a tour date that would allow us to be in town for the Calgary Stampede. The Canadian Pacific Railway has its headquarters in Calgary. It is also known for the hotels it established to promote ridership on their passenger trains. We stayed at two of these, Chateau Lake Louise and Banff Springs Hotel, during this trip….
I am going to share a little about our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding in Seoul. To protect their privacy, the pictures I am using will not show their faces. Our daughter-in-law is a Korean citizen and her family lives in Korea, which is why the marriage took place there. They were married in a wedding hall, which is typical in Korea. The wedding hall staff handles all of the details of the wedding. The bride’s mother typically wears a pink…
Our son and daughter-in-law were married on a Saturday and on Sunday, we had a wonderful lunch with them and our daughter-in-law’s family. After the lunch, our daughter-in-law’s aunt and uncle offered to take us to Imjingak Park (also called Imjingak Station and Imjingak Retreat). Imjingak is located in the town of Paju, South Korea and is only 4 1/2 miles from the Military Demarcation Line. It is the northern most place South Koreans can travel without a permit. Imjingak…
On a day when our son and daughter-in-law were more heavily involved in wedding preparations, we toured the Changdeokgung Palace. When visiting Korea, we found that there were far fewer people who spoke English when compared to other countries we have visited. The hotel concierge wrote down where we were going and gave us a card with the name of our hotel which we could give to our taxi driver, ensuring that we got to where we were going and…
We spent just under a week in South Korea in November, 2009. The highlight of our trip was our son’s wedding. He married a wonderful girl who is a citizen of South Korea. Our daughter-in-law showed us some of the sites in Korea amidst wedding preparations. Seoul was beautifully decorated for the upcoming Christmas holidays. A “hop on – hop off” bus helped us travel easily around Seoul. I have included pictures of some of the sites we saw. The…