Rocky Mountaineer

In July 2026, we took off on a Tauck tour of the Canadian Rockies.

The tour consisted of 42 people and turned out to be a great group of congenial and interesting traveling companions. Our tour director, Lionel Nadon, was wonderful—super organized, full of fascinating information, and great at finding interesting places to visit along the way due to his deep familiarity with the region. From the first moment he started speaking on the bus, I felt like he was channeling Johnny Carson in both speech pattern and mannerism. When I mentioned this to him later in the tour, he dropped into a full-on Johnny Carson imitation, so I’m sure I wasn’t the first one to have noticed this.

The tour began in Vancouver, which was pretty funny for us since we live most of the time in Vancouver, and the first hotel, the Fairmont Waterfront, is a 15-minute walk from our apartment!

I felt sorry for the other guests on the tour because Vancouver this time of year is beautiful, but unfortunately we hit the two rainy days of the month. It didn’t interfere with one of the highlights, though, the float plane sightseeing tour that gave us a bird’s-eye view of the whole peninsula where we live.

The next day we set out on the Rocky Mountaineer train. The train is specifically designed for sightseeing, with glass ceilings on the upper deck and a dining room down below. Everyone has their own reserved seat upstairs, and then half the group at a time goes downstairs for breakfast and lunch. A plethora of drinks and snacks is upstairs, so there was almost an overwhelming amount of food and alcoholic beverages, all with perfect service and food far exceeding our wildest expectations.

The train stops for the night in Kamloops, which is a town we’d been through once before, up in the high desert area of the mountains, so we weren’t expecting much during our overnight stay. You were just taking an overnight bag off the train with you.

Our assigned hotel was Delta, which was perfectly fine, but surprisingly, one of the highlights of the trip was in the hotel bar after dinner. The bartender there, Ash, is quite a cocktail artist and has developed her own following on Instagram.

She had a whole menu of cocktails she had invented, and I spied one particular cocktail that had a very interesting ingredient. She takes a bottle of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and puts two cinnamon sticks in it for 24 hours to create an orange and cinnamon-infused gin. The bar was also stocked with an Amaro I hadn’t seen before from the Okanagan Distillery, the company I’ve done business with. So I asked her to invent a cocktail involving her special gin and that amaro, and she really knocked it out of the park. Here are the ingredients:

Kamloops Cocktail

• Okanagan Distillery Amaro
• Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla (soak two cinnamon sticks for 24 hours)
• Honey
• Lemon juice
• Dehydrated citrus torched

The next morning we re-boarded the train and climbed into the Rockies for two nights at the Fairmont in Jasper.

I think this was Linda’s favorite hotel room of all time. It was a large cabin situated right on the lake with a panoramic view of the surroundings. There was a huge fire in Jasper in 2024, and it burned the trees on nearly all of the mountains. It also took about 30% of the town of Jasper with it. Miraculously, the Fairmont was almost untouched.

Speaking of fire, this would be the theme of the trip. Unfortunately, a wildfire in Kamloops created a massive amount of smoke, and so our week of sightseeing in the Rockies was mostly a week of smoke-seeing. In fact, we found out later that our train was the first one allowed through after two others had been canceled. They’d run a test train through the day before just to make sure they could make it.

For our full day in Jasper, we took a boat ride on Maligne Lake and visited Spirit Island, which was quite scenic despite the smoke.

The next day, we boarded the Tauck tour bus and headed for the Fairmont at Lake Louise. The day’s drive would take us along the incredibly scenic Icefields Parkway, but sadly, the scenery was not to be seen this particular day.

Along the way, we stopped for a short hike to the amazing Athabasca Falls and another to the brilliantly blue-green Peyto Lake.

At Lake Louise, we had a spectacular view of the lake from our room and a wonderful dinner at the Walliser Stube Alpine-themed restaurant, including fondue, Pork Loin Tomahawk Schnitzel, and a 2017 Jacques Frederic Mugnier Nuits-Saint Georges Clos de la Marechale.

The next day we headed to Banff, which is only a short drive from Lake Louise.

Along the way, we went for another short hike along Moraine Lake, which turns out to not actually be dammed by a moraine but rather a rock slide. It was another stunningly blue lake, with lots of people out on it canoeing.

The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is quite famous, and it certainly is an imposing structure perched on the hill amidst the mountains. Our corner room had a lovely view.

For our free day in Banff, we decided to skip the scheduled rafting trip since we’ve been on those before and already had a great view of the river. Instead, we decided to walk around town, which was quite charming, and we went to a Mexican place called Anejo for lunch. This turned out to be one of the best meals on the trip, with the best table-side guacamole we’ve ever had. By chance, we ran into Carole and Mary, two friends from Colorado we’d made on the tour, who happened to pick the same lunch spot.

The farewell dinner was delightful, with an entertaining presentation by a retired Mountie and a beautiful string concert performed on violin and cello by a virtuoso married couple from Banff. Lionel gave us a lovely sendoff, still channeling Johnny Carson.

The next morning dawned with the first clear weather of the trip. Here’s the before and after view from our room:

But it was time to head to Calgary.

Originally, we’d been scheduled to fly back to Vancouver, but because of a WestJet flight attendant strike, I decided to reschedule our flight so that we’d have several days to explore Calgary.

This turned out to be a great decision because we had a delightful time at a boutique hotel called Le Germain, and we were able to explore some of Calgary’s restaurant and museum scene. The highlight was Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre. I got a kick out of all of the historic electronic musical instruments because I had worked on the designs of some of them. They had a great selection of interactives where you could learn to play different instruments and try your hand at mixing audio. It’s one of the best museums I’ve been to.

Tour Highlights

• Vancouver Float Plane Sightseeing
• The Rocky Mountaineer Dining and Service
• Ash, the bartender in Kamloops
• The room at the Fairmont in Jasper
• Athabasca Falls and assorted lakes
• Dinner at the Walliser in Lake Louise
• Lunch at Anejo in Banff
• Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre

Tour Itinerary