one of the most beautiful parts of our trip was the drive south the icefields parkway, connecting jasper to lake louise. here are a few impressions from our stops. we wanted to drive up mount edith cavell as well, but the road was closed.

astoria river bridge and athabasca river.

a beautiful lake and the athabasca falls.

mountains, and the columbia icefield.

our car, and the upper waterfowl lake.

the bow lake and the crowfoot glacier.

lake louise.

after two days in vancouver, we rented a car and drove up to the beautiful town of jasper. from there, we visited, among others, patricia lake, pyramid lake and maligne lake, whose photos can be found below as well as a photo taken at a rest stop somewhere north of kamloops.

after yellowknife, we flew to vancouver. things you can see in the photos are the steam clock, vancouver city, stanley park, a spider, views from the capilano bridge and its park, and a sunset at the pacific ocean’s beach.

on our last night in yellowknife, we had the luck to see an aurora borealis. experiencing an aurora is something hard to describe. the following photos and videos just give a small glimpse of its wafting beauty.

for the more technically interested people, the camera settings i used for most photos are a shutter speed of 8 seconds, aperture of f/4.0 and iso sensitivity of 800. this was the first time where i was really happy that i have a remote for my camera’s shutter and a tripod. below you can view some videos, taken with these settings (hence, between two frames there are around 8 seconds delay). there are six frames per second, whence the videos are around 48 times faster as the real aurora was. each video comes as a flash player together with an avi download (the avi files contain essentially a sequence of jpeg files, so no fancy codec is required).

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

we started our canada tour by flying up to yellowknife, the capital of canadas northwest territories. it’s a town having around 20.000 inhabitants, but it is probably the most touristic place in the northwest of canada, and there are a lot of (non-expensive) flights going there. and, one reason why we went there, it’s quite likely that you can see northern lights. besides that, the area is also very different from southern canada.
on our first day there, it was sunny and we did a hike on the trail around frame lake. this resulted in many beautiful views and photos, some of whose can be seen here:

next, we did a trip to calgary’s zoo.

the zoo contains a dinosaur part, which i didn’t really commented on last time. it features a landscape which is supposed to look like back then, and a few dinosaur models. some of these models look really unrealistic, or more funny. the following photos also feature some of those:

after the ha link peak, we explored calgary’s prince’s island park, where i have been before several times.

maybe you, the reader, noticed that i didn’t really wrote anything here during the last three weeks. well, the reason was that i had a visitor here, namely my girlfriend, and that we did a 10 day tour through western canada. in this and the following posts, i will show some photos from our trip.
the first thing we did was attend our department’s excursion, a hike on top of ha ling peak. here are some impressions from the hike:

last week, i was in the black forest for three days, staying in a wonderful and quiet place called maierhof.

monday.

i travelled by train to oppenau, where i was collected by car. here’s a view from the station in oppenau:

on the first evening i did a small tour. after a very short time i met a cat sitting on a bench:

here are some impressions from the trip:

tuesday.

on tuesday, i planned to visit the all saints waterfalls. i first did a longer walk:

then, i got there:

the waterfalls remind me a bit of the sundance canyon which i visited last year:

finally, a view on the all saints’ abbey:

wednesday.

on wednesday, i went on a trip to oppenau:

there, i got a piece of strawberry cake with hot chocolate:

on the way back, i found a really beautiful place:

the second-last photo shows the maierhof. later, in the evening, i went on a second trip, and found this view in a forest:

on thursday, we made an excursion to the open air museum ballenberg, which shows old buildings from all over switzerland, from centuries ago, together with animals, lifestyle and lots of traditions, including making of cheese and chocolate. this resulted in a lot of pictures, some of which can be seen here.
anyway. it was a really great one-day vacation. thanks a lot!