02 JUL 2003 WEDNESDAY
[editors note: i did not write anything down for this day, so this is entirely from memory]
it rained for much of the day today. amanda and i decided to take a break from hiking in preparation for our wedding ceremony tomorrow, so the rain did not inconvenience us much.
we ate breakfast at the coyote grill again, and then headed to the banff bureau to get our marriage license paperwork. there were three women there; one was getting trained. apparently our marriage license would be the first one that she dealt with. whilst the bureau handles all sorts of governmental paperwork, there were backcountry wedding pictures all about. when amanda commented on them, one of the workers said that most of them were taken across the transcanadian highway on the other side of a concrete barrier. all one had to do that hop over the wall, and it looks like one hiked for hours. funny.
we also got in touch with our marraige commissioner, rick kunelius. we played a bit of phone tag with him (we just hung out at the cascade plaza while doing so since we had to use pay phones), but we eventually arranged to meet him in the lake louise parking lot at 0930 tomorrow morning.
we also lounged about a spiffy internet cafe to get our online fix. the cafe had a very very fast connection.
at some point we walked up the the banff springs hotel to verify our reservation and to check out the place. it was quite stunning. we also tried to get in touch with safina, as her family was on vacation in the area and she said that she would be staying at the hotel [ed note: they were actually staying at a place in radium, a bit of a drive away], but we were unsuccessful. amanda apparently told her we were going to be in parking lot at 10am, but i was completely unaware of these plans when i talked to the marriage commisioner. i had not realized that she would be in the area at the same time. anyways, apparently safina was unsure if she could make it there regardless, as amanda had not talked to her in a while (they had both been studying for the boards).
later, we hung about some bookstores, wandered about downtown banff, did our laundry, and prepared for the next day. since we had to be there early in the morning, we packed up as much as we could beforehand and bought stuff for the hike. amanda also wished flowers and perhaps fresh doughnuts, so we found out that the kellers foods opened at 0730 and the safeway at 0800. we decided to just go the safeway when it opened as we should have enough time to make it to lake louise (an hour from banff).