Canada Can. Canada can give you so much beauty, you're taking it for granted before long. Can you, really? Can you ever, really, do that?
Yeah, yeah, waterfall, glacier, turquoise lakes, spotless blue skies or frothy white clouds, mighty peaks in the Rockies. Whatever. Six days of driving in Banff and Jasper National Parks gives you this and much much more. We started in Vancouver and drove to Lake Louise, at the begining of what appeared to be a daunting journey. We are a family of four with two teenaged kids, one on the brink, the other bang in the middle of teen-age-hood. The average is decidedly teen-aged - in fact, one claims to have had a teen-life-crisis already (and that's the younger one). They sallied forth with ipods, mobile telephony, a lap top that burnt CDs almost as quick as they tired of them and DVD players. My husband tinkered with the magical path finder of all times - the GPS. I held my small digital camera expectantly in my lap.
It was a 10 hour drive to our first halt - the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise. The idea of living on the shores of a glacier fed lake, encircled by tall mountains excited me no end and I'd dreamt of it ever since I'd seen the pictures. 
But not the kids. What was Mom thinking? Sitting in a car for 10 hours with nothing to do?? That's, like, insane. No TV, internet, video games or life support? I squirmed at the accusations and packed some more Doritos, Oreo cookies, a couple more McChicken sandwiches, fries, sweet satisfying bars of candy, chocolate, a jar of Salsa even.
The first five hours only brought sounds of slumber in the back. A grunt here, a snore there, a sleepy question now and then amounting to, 'are we there yet?', but nothing more. They may just sleep all the way. I relaxed to enjoy the drive myself. Rendered useless in my map-reading role, thanks to Mrs. GPS; but I dared not sleep. Though we were still jet-lagged, flying in from Bombay, via Hong Kong, i needed to keep an eye on my husband and make sure he did not drop off. I made him take off his dark glasses so i could see what his eyes were doing. He was not amused. I jumped when the car went over the rumble strips, almost grabbing the wheel and correcting the course of our surely off-road vehicle. He was only testing the sound they made, he assured me. We never went over those again, except when our son wanted to know what the ruckus had been about and it had to be replayed for his viewing pleasure.
But the second 5 hours were a different story. So were all the drives we took in the five days spent in the Banff and Jasper National Parks of Alberta, Canada.
Canada can and did awe us, including our children. Yeah, yeah, it can. When we entered Banff National Park situated in the Rockies, we were rewarded straight off with sightings of moose. 
The caribou, a timber wolf, sheep with big recurving horns, all in and of the wild, were served at convenient intervals off the highway to break the monotony; enough to keep us awake and looking for more. The ipod was shunned; instead all recording devices were requisitioned - cameras, phones, DVD recorders - anything capable of capturing an image. For city-breds, it was the rural-equivalent of seeing a celebrity on Broadway. Once the dam was broken , there came a flood, no sight too simple to ignore. Did you get those trees? I heard from the back seat. So awesome! Hey, look at the clouds - they are super-sized. That one goes from this end all the way to that. Man, that's amazing. Do you like one big cloud or small fluffy ones? I like the small ones that look like cotton candy. Same. Me too. What's that? A glacier? Just look at it, it's thicker than an 80 storey building there - it's, like, Planet Ice. Can you pull over, Baba, we want a shot of the sunset. It's 10 o'clock and the sun's not set yet? - wow - I want to live here - it's totally unreal. 
Take a look at all that rock. These mountains rock, ha ha. Whoever named them knew what he was doing, man. The Rockies. Cool. Those've enough rock to cover all of downtown Bombay - or at least the part where Baba's office is. Can i climb through the sun-roof to get that shot - the trees are in the way on my side. I want the river - it's got a bend in it that's totally impossible - it's, like, going backwards or something out there. Give it to me - the sunset's reflecting in the lake there...
And that is how they carried on. On a generator all of their own - drawing similies they were familiar and comfortable with. It may not be poetry, but to my ears, it was Pure Byron. 
Then all of a sudden - O Oh - camera malfunction - what an idiot - i hate technology. What a time to give up - this is just too awesome not to have on camera. I smile. I specially savour the line - 'I hate technology'. I wish i had that on record. Canada can make people say and do all these things.
