Tuesday

We went horseback riding for over 4 hours. We started at picturesque (despite the crowds) Lake Louise, up to the Plain of Six Glaciers Tea House. Lake Louise is tinted a beautiful green from the glacier water, although it is anchored on one side by the enormous Hotel Fairmont.
It took over 2 hours to ride past Lake Louise and up to the Tea House. The Tea House is a little tiny restaurant with no electricity, completely isolated at the top of the mountains, where the staff stay for a week at a time in a cabin. Our guide was dragging along a pack horse with a week's worth of mayo. The Tea House was built when mountaineering was in its heyday, sometime in the 1800's. Many nearby peaks can be reached from the formerly glacier filled plain, and many are named for mountaineers who fell off of them. The views were amazing the entire trip, and the riding was a blast. We stopped and had some berry pie at the tea house, then headed back down. Along the way, we got to practice our one-handed-moving-target photography, and had great success at capturing horse's rear-ends.

 


That night for dinner, we embarked on a mission to search Canada for Canadian Bacon. After carefully researching a restaurant featuring Hawaiian pizza on the menu, we headed out. The listed ingredients mentioned ham, but no Canadian Bacon. When the waiter came to take our order, we asked him about getting Canadian Bacon on our pizza, but he had no idea what that was and had never been asked about it before. After we informed him that the little round slices of ham were called Canadian Bacon in America, he was just as curious as we were and he suggested we "Google it". We did Google it, while enjoying some regular ham on our Hawaiian, and the other pizza, featuring Elk! According to Google, Americans are the only ones who refer to any cut of ham as Canadian Bacon. The moniker may have originated during a pork shortage suffered sometime in the 20th century by America and the U.K., when Canadian pork was imported.