When Ryan and I were in Seattle I asked him if we could go away just us for May Long because we were separated for a good chunk of April while I was travelling to LA, Vancouver, and Seattle. He said if we got a hotel he would go because every May Long he has gone camping he would get rained or snowed on. He also suggested we take the dogs and spend some time with them rather than hire a pet sitter again (this has been such a great travel year for me so far).
I found a pet friendly hotel in Fernie Stanford Resort, located outside the down town core of Fernie, next to the entrance to the ski resort. The hotel looked nice enough online and it had a water slide so I figured it wouldn’t be another Howard Johnson disaster. Even better, when I went to book- rooms were only $99/night and they didn’t charge a pet cleaning fee like most hotels! It all sounded too good to be true but the hotel room was nice and clean and the hotel was on the river. The pet friendly floor is on the “1st floor” which is actually more like a walk out basement so the room had a small window but for a clean room that took my two dogs, I was happy.
We woke up Saturday to a cloudy but warm day and after a quick breakfast we headed off to Mt. Hosmer to climb to the peak. I’ll give full details on this hike in a separate post but this hike was killer! It was straight up the entire time and I was huffing and puffing and altogether DYING worse than I have on any other hike before. Sadly, we didn’t make it to the very peak because there was too much snow to make it up the last half mile. We still really enjoyed ourselves and the dogs fell asleep almost as soon as they got in the car.
After that long hike we were starving and went off in search of tacos. The only Mexican place we could find was Nevados, a trendy restaurant in Fernie’s kitschy downtown. We were told they don’t do food to go when it’s busy and there was a wait for a table. Because the dogs were in the car, we opted to try somewhere else.
So instead, we headed to Pho Locoal. I love pho and so does Ryan and it sounded like a filling meal after our hike. The restuarnat itself was super cute and had a nice vibe. I ordered the salad rolls with prawns and avocado to start and they were so delicious! Then Ryan ordered the pork belly pho and I ordered the lemon chicken pho. When our food came to us, the pho looked much different than any other place we have been and after each taking a sip, we realized that their specialty broth was not at all to our liking. I tried to doctor it with Hoisin and Sirach sauces but it was no use, the broth flavouring was just too string and didn’t taste good. So we did something that we have never done ever, we called over our waitress and said we couldn’t eat it and would like our tab. She was gracious about it and only charged us for the salad rolls. She said a lot of people love the different broth, but it definitely wasn’t a traditional broth.
So in the end, we pulled into Kevin’s Place or something to that effect off Highway 3 and ordered a massive amount of Chinese food and went back to the hotel and ate until we were sick.
Sunday morning we checked out and headed to the Fernie Visitor Information Centre to hike to Fairy Creek Falls. This is a very easy, beginner hike that I’ll dedicate a post to, but we enjoyed ourselves as the sun came out at last and we could hear the creek running. The falls were spectacular! And if our dogs weren’t so antsy being on leashes (there were too many people around to let them off leash to play in the water) we would have stayed a bit longer to enjoy the falls.
After our hike we headed back. We only planned to stay until Sunday so Ryan could golf on Monday and I could have a free day to do as I pleased.
It was such a fun weekend getaway and I told Ryan I want to go back to Stanford with the kids because they would love to play on the waterslide and by the river.
What did you do for May Long?
Did you get snowed on?
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