Road Trip - Banff

Today was a slow day, given the amount of driving we'd done the day before. We slept in, and hung around the campsite until the early afternoon. The temperature here seems to peak at about 4-5pm, not midday as it would in NZ. The camp, which had been packed the night before, totally emptied out. I guess all the weekend campers heading back home.

While we were reading our books, we noticed a little squirrel jump up onto a tree stump and start squeaking his tiny lungs out. We're not sure what he was saying, but after a while another couple of squirrels living under a tree 50m away appeared from their holes and started squeaking back at him. The let me get surprisingly close to take a photo, before scrambling back underground.

In the afternoon packed up our tent and headed into town to go on a tour of the Parks Distillery, in the middle of downtown banff. They showed us their still setup, where they made vodka, gin, and rye whiskey. They had a pot still, two fractionated columns, and a condenser, all joined together with a series of pipes and valves that could be switched to send the alcohol vapour around the equipment in different configurations. The rye they only distill twice, from the pot still straight to the condenser, and back again for another round. Vodka goes through both fractionated columns until it comes out in the condenser at a little over 95% alcohol. Their gin follows the same process, but is piped through a 'botanical basket' behind the fractionated columns, where the vapour is infused with the flavour of classic juniper berries, along with spruce tips, lemon and orange peel, and other flavours.

Pretty much everything at the distillery was done by hand, from measuring and loading ingredients to blending and making the call on where to split the heads, heart, and tails from the still. We were amazed to learn that they had filled over 100,000 using their little 4-bottle machine!

We met a fellow on the tour who was from Ontario who turned out to be a high school teacher, and over the spirit tasting he and Katie talked for ages about the state of education and the market for teachers in Toronto. He'd taught in various places overseas for over 10 years, and very strongly recommended Singapore. Perhaps that's where we'll head next?

We bought a bottle of gin, left the distiller with a definite buzz going, and stopped at a nearby Starbucks. We sat there for maybe two hours, and slowly wrote the blog post about the Calgary Stampede. Eventually I got too hot and hungry, so we walked around for a bit and found a nice looking restaurant where we enjoyed a pizza.

Once the food had settled and the spirits had worn off, we drove up the aptly named Sulphur Mountain behind Banff to the Upper Banff Hot Springs. These springs are naturally heated from water flowing down from snow melt and rain through the Sulphur Mountain Thrust Fault. We relaxed in the pool for about half an hour, enjoying the view across the valley to Mount Rundle, before heading back to camp for the night.