Ahhhh, waking up in a suite hotel at Jasper National Park. Delightful!

Today is just about checking things out to enjoy this week. Relaxing without pressure to do anything, but wanting to get some things like skiing and walking trails in.

After breakfast in the Inn, I took a load of clothes to the tenant laundry. Unfortunately I had chosen a machine that decided to stop working half way through the cycle. After trying everything to get it to work, I did the usual technological solution – I pulled out the plug and reconnected. It did the same thing again and so this time I got a technician in. He paid for me to use another machine, and so whilst that worked I spent 15 minutes in the sauna. I then switched the clothes into the drier and sat down and read the newspaper.

I took the dry clothes back to my room and then wandered down to the town centre to pop into the Visitors Centre to ask about skiing and walking trails. I got some really good information. I then went to the main street grocery store and purchased some food, and a camping store to buy some bathers for the pool and spa. I took a few photos whilst walking down the street.

The first photo below is of the Visitors Centre, and the second is the front of the Railway Station. They are both great buildings.

Some of the information I read on a street sign advised that the Jasper Forest Park was established in 1907. It was later renamed the Jasper National Park after being granted national park status in 1930. This attracted people to the area, and this was followed by the railway which brought more visitors and residents to the town. Jasper (which is in the Alberta Province) is one of the few National Parks that have a settlement in their boundaries.

The park covers 10,878 square kilometres of forests, glaciers, lakes and peaks, including Mount Edith Cavell (11,033 feet or 3363 metres high). In 2014, there were 2.2 million visitors to Jasper National Park. The average high and low temperatures for January are -3.7 degrees C and -15.3 degrees C, respectively. Interestingly, it has been around 10 to 12 degrees lower this week for both lows and highs, than these averages.

Once I got back to the Inn, I headed down to the pool for 10 minutes, the spa for 20 minutes and then the sauna for another 15 minutes.

What a great feeling.

I then went back to my room, switched on my TV and found the delightful President-elect of the USA giving his much vaunted press conference. For entertainment, I then switched between Fox, CNN and MSNBC for an hour each to see them, as expected, selectively editing the conference video to show their own preferred views. That was quite exhausting, and I was starting to feel that I was getting a cold (now? after everywhere else I’ve been in the past two months??) and it ended up being 10pm so I took a High Potency Vitamin C tablet went to bed.