And in summation .....

It's been roughly a month now, since my return from Banff.  The dust has settled and the clothes washed and put away, and the travel kit is replenished for the next adventure.  It seems a good time to sum up the experience.

Overall, the trip was fine....just not up to what I have come to expect from Road Scholar.  It seems as though it was a kind of throw-back to what Elderhostel once was, brief educational experiences housed in college dormitories which were empty for the summer.  My accommodations would certainly qualify under than banner.  My room felt like the R.A.'s apartment for a dormitory than a state of the art hotel room.  The furnishings were pretty basic, albeit showing evidence of a final project in design,  trendy, without being functional.  Lighting was terrible, and the heating system was uncontrollable, and the service (cleaning, replacing courtesy items like coffee and tea) were intermittent and seemed like to kind of job one would expect from college students doing a summer job, which, I sure, was exactly the situation.

The program, itself seemed disorganized.  Maybe the planners knew exactly what was supposed to be happening, but as a participant, it seemed to me to be a lot of last minute decision making and not much communication before the fact.  I also thought the "educational" component lacked much depth.  For example, it might have been helpful for those of us from the lower 48 to have a brief introduction to Canadian history, beyond the building of the railroad.  And while we heard about obscure pioneer women, we heard nothing about the indigenous people, now called "First Nations" and had no cultural encounter with them at all.

Over all, this tour seemed more like a promotional effort for the Banff Center and Banff tourism than I would expect from Road Scholar.  I'm glad I made the trip, but I found it worth the money only if I ceased thinking about what it could have been.

Road Scholar has a chance to redeem itself in a few weeks when I travel with them, again to Utah and the National Parks there.  It seems like an important trip to make at this time, before more National Parks are down graded or reduced by the short-sighted policies of the Trump administration.  God help us all!

My concluding pictures with be of my room, which I rate at below Motel 6!  You can decide for yourself.

A bed with a view of a service road.

Minimalist Desk and Chair