This will be our last night in our cabin tucked away in the woods at the foot of the Canadian Rockies. Tomorrow, we make our way back to Calgary and then board a plane on Saturday morning bound for Hot ‘Lanta.

Marion says to me, “By this time next week, this will all be just a memory.”

That’s the thing about our adventures in life. Most of them are brief. Whether we ride down to the lake for a weekend of camping and fishing, or we let Delta sweep us away to some distant destination, eventually we come home. Hopefully with a bucket full of memories.

I am grateful for this trip to Canada. Coming here was not on our radar. Marion and I, since we met, have laughed a lot about how many of our bucket list items are so closely aligned. Two separate people living in two separate towns until we’re in our sixties, and yet our dreams about travelling in our retirement years have matched up almost perfectly.

But making a trip to Canada wasn’t something we ever talked about. The only reason we came to Canada was because Laura and Eric were coming up at her boss’s invitation, and she asked us if we could bring their kids up here to them at the end of their stay in Canmore. They wanted to show the kids the sights.

We considered her request for about two seconds and said, “Yes.”

There’s no doubt that we are taking back a lot of memories. Marion has been counting the wildlife since the first day we arrived at the cabin and two deer, a buck and a doe, came plodding by right outside our window. She squealed at the mouse that raced across the trail in front of us. We stood and watched two mountain goats grazing by the roadside. And finally, this evening, a black bear lumbered across the road near our cabin.

“Oh my goodness, there’s a bear!”

When she gets excited her country twang ratchets up a notch. “There’s a bar!” Too bad she couldn’t get her camera out fast enough. His black, shiny body disappeared into the roadside thicket 30 yards before we could get up even with him.

“That made my day,” she said.

There’s beauty to be seen almost anywhere. I’ve sat in awe of some pretty nice sunsets from atop Pine Mountain back home on a number of occasions. But when you venture into a place like the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the opportunity for beauty to overwhelm you almost exceeds the human capacity to take it all in.

There are no adequate words. There just isn’t. I can’t even begin to describe the color of blue that settles into all these glacier lakes that dot the valleys between the mountains. Is it indigo? Maybe cobalt? Some call it turquoise. Sky blue, sapphire, teal, ice blue? I just don’t know.

I’ve tried to think of a way to help you see the mammoth peaks that rise up out of the earth in every direction. Some stand like knife edges all stacked in a row. Some tower like rock castles that kiss the sky. One after another they come into view on the horizon. The snow and ice clings to the crevices above the tree line.

I could tell you that the rivers and waterfalls roar like distant thunder. Some fall over a thousand feet from the tip of an unseen icefield beyond the edge of the cliff. Some cascade over a set of boulders as wide as a football field and plunge 150 foot down the raging river valley. But even that doesn’t do it all justice.

I’ve learned a little bit of geology while I’ve been here. “Egad,” you say.

I thought we were coming just to see the Canadian Rockies, and we have seen them. But there are two sets of mountains up here that parallel each other. The Columbia range and the Rockies are divided by what’s known as the Rocky Mountain Trench, a natural valley that can be seen from outer space. It runs from Montana to the Yukon territory and is one of the longest continuous valleys in the world.

Our cabin is sitting in that trench. The Columbia River flows through that trench.

So, if I were to get up from my comfy seat on this couch and go outside and look east, I’d be looking at the Rocky Mountains, maybe two or three miles away. The closest mountain is tall enough, that even though the sun comes up at 5am, no direct sunlight hits the cabin until almost 7:30.

If I turn around and look west, I’m looking at the Columbia Mountains, maybe 5 or 6 miles away. Just as impressive. Just as enormous. Just as awesome as anything we’ve seen on any of our travels. Our day at Glacier National Park was in the middle of the Columbia mountain range.

All this to say that for the last seven days Marion and I have been in the middle of a vast, almost other-earthly geological wonder of the world that covers something over 127,000 square miles. It stands above our heads at over 11,000 feet. It sneers at us from the ancient days of old when tectonic plates moved and rivers sprang up from beneath the terra that once was not so firma.

I can tell you this much. Our eyes are bugging out of our heads. Our phone cameras are so over-heated the plastic covers are melting. Her hip hurts. My calves are mooing. And we both took a nap this afternoon.

Coming here has been an eye-opener for me. It has given new meaning to the word ‘majestic’.

Imagine a small ant who lived his entire life crawling around on the floor. His world is defined by all the things that are at his level. He might crawl up a stool leg. He might occasionally find a crumb on the floor over which he celebrates enthusiastically. He mostly just looks straight ahead. Sometimes left or right, but never up because his world is…well, flat.

This may be a little overly dramatic, but before I came to these mountains, I was that ant. I’m a home-body at heart. Left to my own tendencies, I could live in my own little world and be content to stay there. I’ve travelled a little bit. I’m travelling a lot more now that I have Marion to keep me company.

I used to laugh at my sister who travelled all over the world. “All those distant countries!” I’d say it with a certain tone, like staying home was somehow more righteous, more pure-American. “I don’t need to see all those places,” I’d say.

As vast as they are, these mountains are but a small drop in a very large and majestic world. The Maker’s canvas stretches far beyond my flat world. I want to see that. I want to look over the hill from where I live once in a while.

So, yes, home is next. And, soon enough, all this week’s adventure will be just a memory.

But some memories change us forever.