Airfare: NONE. This is one of the few trips we didn’t fly for, and I guarantee this trip is much better when done as a road trip.

Transportation: We used my Father-In-Law’s truck for this adventure and drove up from Salt Lake City. It’s a bit of a long drive to get up to Alberta, but once you’re there things get real pretty real quick. Overall our road trip made one big loop and looked like this: SLC > Waterton > Calgary > Banff > Jasper > Spokane > SLC

Hotels: We didn’t stay in any hotels for this trip. This is best done as summer/fall camping road trip, so I had booked campsites online months beforehand. You’ll want to book them as far ahead of time as possible, because they fill up and sell out fairly quick. Our campsites cost anywhere between $20-35 per night, so the total accommodations cost only came out to like $120-140 (pretty affordable considering that’s an avg cost for one night at a hotel). Even when you factor in cost for gas, you’re still coming out on top.

Food: We brought a cooler with ice, and stopped at various grocery stores along the way. This made it easy, cheap, and low maintenance. We did eat out a couple times as we saw unique places we wanted to try throughout the towns.

Activities: If you’re not an outdoorsy person, this probably isn’t the trip for you. We did a bunch of hiking and saw lakes, rivers, wildlife, and other fun naturey things. Here are a few of our favorites: Weiners of Waterton, Waterton Lake, Lake Louise, Peyto Lake, the drive from Banff to Jasper, Lac Beauvert, and Coeur D’Alene. Also, the best part about this trip is that everything is super dog-friendly so we were able to take Teton everywhere we went.

— DAL

— ERIKA