Breathtaking. If I had to sum up my Banff vacation in one word, that would be it. Until the summer of 2019, I had never traveled outside of the United States. While the United States is beautiful, I craved international travel. Since my hobby is photography, I heavily researched destinations where I knew I would be able to capture some amazing photos. I kept coming back to Banff, Alberta, Canada. I began booking our June 2019 vacation in September of 2018. I have no regrets about this extremely advanced planning either.
I started in September by reserving our hotel, flight, and rental car for the following June. This allowed us to pick the hotel and room that we really wanted, and the round-trip flights were less than $500 from San Antonio, TX, to Calgary, Alberta at that time. Also, any car you could possibly want was available for rent so we selected an all-wheel drive SUV. Once the room, flight, and car were booked, I spent the next 8 months doing research, and I did a lot of research.
Like most popular vacation destinations, there are several ways to experience your vacation. You can jump onto a bus every day, with fifty or more people, their kids, strollers, and all of the other paraphernalia vacationers haul with them. Or you can set out on your own and do a completely self-guided trip. My husband and I are not tour bus, crowds, and schedule-following types of vacationers, so we opted to self-guide for our whole vacation.
Once I started really diving into what there was to do in Banff, I quickly became overwhelmed. We were going to be there for 6 nights and 7 days, and if we did everything I wanted to do, we would need to extend our vacation by about two months! That wasn’t an option, so I began focusing on the top 10 things that appealed to us. We decided to do several days of hiking, followed by whitewater rafting, and then to visit a wolf dog sanctuary. This also gave us a little bit of downtime to explore the town of Banff but also kept us busy taking in everything else.