Welcome to Canmore.

Sometimes you forget how beautiful the Rocky Mountains are. It's one thing to see them from Calgary; it's an entirely different experience to be right up close and personal. Day one in Canmore is excellent. We're staying at the Malcolm Hotel, taking our meals in the Stirling Grill and Lounge, and are both looking forward to hot-tubbing in the snow and taking it easy. And, like, the Three Sisters are right there.

Canmore's motto is probably, "Not Banff."

We went for a short walk into Canmore proper just to get out and about and stretch our legs. Thankfully, we both had new winter jackets because it was minus a million degrees. Canmore reminded both of us of Kensington-Meets-Banff but with much less Banff. It's not overly touristy. The shops are primarily local, and the people seem to want to be here, which isn't always the case in tourist towns.

On our agenda was to find Cafe Books bookstore and hunt down something for Jenn to read. Cafe Books is friendly and unpretentious; the books were in some kind of order that eluded me. There were sections, but nothing was alphabetical; there were no real surprises in the titles—just titles that sell regularly. Not unexpected, and not terrible, but not super remarkable like Pages in Kensington. Not to keep comparing everything to Kensington either, but if you've been to Pages, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

A helpful clerk recommended a book to Jenn by an author whose name escapes me, and as a selfish treat, I bought her Chris Hadfield's new novel "The Apollo Murders," which I will happily devour as soon as she's done with it.

After breakfast and hot tubs and coffees with books, we'll get back to working on our next Dropbear and Panda project—creative retreats are hard work, after all.