The first two big hiking and outdoors trips I’d ever done were to Marin Headlands when I was 10 years old for an overnight school trip in elementary school, and then to Olympic National Park in Washington state on an outdoor education trip via my middle school when I was 14. Outside of these trips, I’d never been exposed much to the “outdoors.” My parents never appreciated hiking or visiting national parks, so they were never going to take me. And when friends’ parents offered to take me on snow sport outings to Tahoe, my mom always refused to let me go. She was overprotective, to say the least.

When I look back on my childhood, those are two trips I always remember fondly as happy moments of my life. I was with good friends, my parents weren’t there, and I was just there to take in my surroundings and all these new and foreign experiences. I think that these trips helped me develop a desire to do more hiking, visit more national parks, and pursue new outdoor recreational activities.

Yesterday, after about seven hours of hiking, we sat and relaxed at the Fairmont Lake Louise bar in Banff National Park, and we chatted with a man who came with his wife and two children from New Jersey. They love the outdoors, and in this same year, also visited Bryce and Zion National Park in Utah as we just did. He said they did many hikes, some more strenuous like the Lake Agnes tea house hike overlooking Lake Louise, and their children, ages 10 and 12, really enjoyed them. He said they exposed their kids to a lot of outdoor activities, so they were used to be being outside and active.

That’s what I want for our future kids. I want them to appreciate both urban city life and the outdoors, and to be exposed to hiking in natural, beautiful places like Banff from a young age. It’s true that my parents never took me to national parks or hiking in places like Yosemite or Olympic National Park, but they did pay for me to have the opportunities to do those two outdoors trips that led to my appreciation of nature and love of hiking. I still had the opportunities in a different way. And I’m grateful for that. I hope to be able to take it a step further with my own children and participate with them. Because don’t we all want our kids to have more than what we have been privileged to have?

I hate waking up early, and I definitely do not do it naturally. My friends say I am a morning person because they know I wake up to do weekday morning workouts before work, and they also know that when traveling, Chris and I wake up early to start our days as soon as possible. But that doesn’t mean I’m naturally a morning person; it just means I have realized that waking up early means I am maximizing daylight hours, and when traveling, I want as much daylight as possible to soak in the day and the place that I am temporarily in.

From a hiker and photographer’s perspective, early morning is the best time to be out: the parking lots at national parks and trails will be fairly empty, the crowds thus will be lesser, the temperature will be lower (more important in hot climates like Arizona), and the light will be best for photographs because of its softness and the position of the sun. The sun’s light creeping up in the morning here brushes against the tops of mountains, creating an illuminating orangish-red hue that you will never, ever get if you take the exact same photo just an hour later or in the afternoon. Sunset is good, too, but that burning color won’t be there the same way. And who wants to be stuck on top of a mountain after dark when you climb down once finished with taking your epic photos?

We didn’t get to Lake Moraine until 7:30 this morning (that’s later than we wanted, because again, I’m not a morning person and struggled to get up), so the orange hues I wanted to see were gone. We only got them during the drive to the park when seeing the mountains we approached. But one thing we did get to enjoy was the absolute stillness of the lake. Every reflection of the mountain, the logs, the clouds, and the trees could be seen, and it was so stunning. I’m a little obsessed with water reflections; I can’t explain why. I just think natural water is amazing, and when the clouds or the mountains are reflected off of it, it’s gorgeous — natural beauty in its quietest moment. The lakes will only be still early in the morning and later in the evening around sunset, so it’s another reason to get up early to enjoy this still moment. We’ll be chasing a lot of reflections on this trip — we won’t be here long, so we need to soak it all in.

Chris has status with several hotel groups, which means that we oftentimes either get free nights at hotels or room upgrade perks. This afternoon when we checked into our hotel just outside Banff, we found out we got a room upgrade for a “loft-style” room complete with two full bathrooms. Two full bathrooms for the two of us? I immediately decided we were going to take advantage of this and use our own bathrooms. I set up all my stuff downstairs, while he has the upstairs bathroom where the bedroom is. He thought I was being silly, but why not embrace it for the short time we have it?

Because we have both lived in New York for eight to nine years, while he’s lived in Manhattan the entire time and I’ve lived in Manhattan for the last four years, space is something that we don’t take for granted. We have so little of it in our own apartment, so it makes sense. When we are traveling and staying at hotels, we relish the space in our temporary rooms because many times, the entire square footage is larger than our entire apartment back in New York. In a seemingly funny way, that “extra” space we get takes some getting used to. The idea that I could have my own bathroom, if even just for two nights, was exciting to me. The large counter space, the full bath and extended shower rod — these are little luxuries. It’s the little things when you are traveling that make it fun and enjoyable, and ultimately an escape from real life.

We’re off to Banff tomorrow morning. I’d heard of the Canadian Rockies decades ago, but I never realized that Banff National Park in Alberta was actually the main park that people refer to when they talk about the Canadian Rockies. I learned this in 2010 when I was flipping through a random travel magazine and daydreaming about traveling the world. As soon as I saw the iconic photos of Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, two of the most photographed lakes on earth, I knew I had to see this place myself.

Travel trends are always evolving, and as people travel more, they learn about more seemingly obscure places. If it weren’t for my in-laws, I wouldn’t know about Rovaniemi, the town of Santa Claus (this is real). Seven years ago, the word “Banff” didn’t mean anything to me, but after I read that magazine, it was on my list of “must-see” places in the near future. I’ve been telling colleagues about this planned trip for the last two weeks, and a lot of them had no idea what Calgary or Banff was. I’d Google image photos for them of Banff and the lakes or tell them these are part of the Canadian Rockies, and then they would get awestruck by the beauty of these places.

Our northern neighbor is much under appreciated by my fellow Americans, but that’s fine by me; it’s less tourist traffic that we need to deal with. 🙂

A close friend of mine gifted Chris and me a GoPro Hero 4 as a wedding gift, and today, I’m finally getting around to opening it and tinkering. As soon as I opened the box, I realized that this seemingly tiny camera had so many parts that it would be quite overwhelming to set up and understand what everything was for. I even had to look up some YouTube videos on how to set up certain parts.

This camera is so small that it fits in the palm of my hand, yet it takes 12-megapixel photos, has a lot of complex settings (you can even control down to the second your light exposure during night shots.. I wonder if I will ever get *that* into this to be that anal and do that), and has a waterproof case with multiple types of “back doors” that you switch out depending on how waterproof you want your camera to be, or what you’d like the sound quality to be like. Clearly, this was not meant to be a simple point-and-shoot camera and needs quite a bit of learning to maximize its capabilities. The one thing it does not do is zoom in and out, so it’s one thing for me to be cognizant of when I am taking this on our trips and leaving our DSLR at home.

The idea of having such a tiny camera replace my bulky DSLR is so attractive, though. The GoPro is so tiny and light, so it would lessen Chris’s whining when I make him carry the DSLR around. We’ll see how it goes during our Banff trip this week.