Vancouver Island - Day 2

I'm not certain what to make of today.  It started off extremely well, but ended with an exceedingly long and tiring drive through the mountains, with only the promise of more of the same tomorrow.

We started with breakfast in the hotel, then packed up and left Lethbridge, where you rather quickly start seeing mountains in the distance.  We then drove into the mountains and stopped at the Frank slide interpretive center, exactly like the last time we took this route 12 years ago.  This time we actually walked the entire path through the rocks, since we weren't dealing with very small children.  However, we were dealing with the scrambling mountain goat that is Bradley, who had to be told to stop climbing on some of the rocks quite a few times.

Then there was a quick trip to Sparwood where we ate lunch in front of the giant dump truck and then did a little bit of grocery shopping.  This is where things turned a bit for me, as it was almost 12:30pm and we still had 5+ hours of driving to go.  And the drive was frustrating.  The first part of the drive is actually through a whole bunch of valleys, so it isn't hard driving, but there were a lot of vehicles on the road and far too many vehicles going 80 km/h and far too many vehicles making insanely dangerous passes.

South of Cranbrook, the highway actually starts crossing the mountains and the rest of the trip was high grades up and down.  This section of the highway had very few cars on it, but it was much more difficult to drive, and by that time in the day, I was exhausted.  We managed to make it to Grand Forks and our hotel, where we stopped for supper, but I was spent.

Tomorrow is a slightly shorter driving day, but we end up in Vancouver and its traffic, so we'll see how that goes.