Canada 2010: Banff Springs Hotel

Doretha and Linda were very interested in doing a tour of the luxury hotel, the Fairmont Banff Spring Hotel.

We went through this roundabout to find some paid parking close to the hotel. We had an interesting experience meeting a car going the opposite direction on a presumably one way roundabout.

This guy, William Cornelius Van Horne, was the driving force behind establishing resort hotels owned and operated by Canadian Pacific Railroad.

The hotel was designed in a Scottish baronial style.

Here is one of the accommodation wings.

Hotels move with the times. Now they stache snowboards as well as other sporting gear.

Linda and Doretha get ready to into the main lobby.

Concierges to the right.

Here’s ours. We bought our tickets for the tour at $15 per gawker.

Their motto: always the same

Here is a nice chandelier.

Here are a couple of posers on a grand staircase.

There is another expensive light fitting on the next floor.

And another.

There is even a fancy logo on the gents.

Well, here is our guide. Apparently, he is the hotel’s official historian. He seemed to spend a more time dropping names of guests that he had come into contact with than talking about the history of the hotel. But at least we had access to various rooms that were not usually open to the public. However, it is worth noting that we didn’t get to sight any accommodation.

The windows were specifically designed to fit into the scheme of an old Scottish castle, even to the extent of installing narrow defendable slit windows.

Needless to say, since the railroad had first choice of building sites, the views were magnificent.

Another view of note was probably not on the schedule. I hope these people had plenty of mosquito repellent, as the mosquitoes were quite fierce in Banff because of extended hot weather combined with unseasonal heavy rain.