After Lake Minnewanka, we drove up Mount Norquay, which is a ski resort.  (I am NOT a skiier - I tried ONE time and hated every moment of it.  It seems a silly sport to me - pay lots of money to ride up the mountain, then fall down the mountain and start over.  LOL  But I love watching the ski events in the Winter Olympics.)  The drive up the mountain offers some lovely views of the town of Banff below.

We thought it would be a good place to get our family picture for the 2007 Christmas cards, but despite my Mom's best efforts with the camera, the sun once again was in an awkward position for picture-taking.  This is the best we came up with at that spot.

Our next stop was in town for lunch.  We tried to visit our all-time favorite restaurant there - Melissa's - but to our horror, they were closed that week for cleaning!  Rats!!!!!  So we went to Phil's instead, after wandering around downtown Banff for a bit.  After lunch we went down to see Bow Falls. (I almost said "over to Bow Falls, but thought that sounded like we had gone OVER the falls.  LOL)

The falls are mostly frozen, but enough water is coming through to keep everything moving.  There is a great hiking trail that goes up the near side of the falls, but that also was closed for the winter.  Here are a couple other views looking downriver a bit, but taken from about the same place.

That riverbend above? It's where the Spray River joins the Bow, and that's where we put in our canoes! Not on this visit of course!  When DH and I lived in Calgary, we took a couple of canoe trips down the Bow River.  Great memories.

Looks like another good spot for a Christmas card picture!!  This is the one we wound up choosing for our cards:

That's the best we could do.  I like this picture a lot, even though we're looking different directions and not everyone has a nice smile.  With six people, and three of them boys that don't like to smile for pictures, the standards for what is considered a "good" family portrait drop considerably.   I got a nice picture of my Mom and Dad here too:

I think DH is remembering the canoe trip and how HOT it was that day LOL:

Harrison found a place to do a few chin-ups...

And then it was time to move on.  We drove around the Banff Springs Hotel, which none of us can afford to stay in (but I have eaten in a couple of the restaurants in the distant past).

That's it for this time.  My next installment of vacation pictures will include some geology-related stuff, the educational portion of our trip.