Start and end your road trip in high style, naturally

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Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge

Updated: November 19, 2010 5:00PM

A couple of scenic hotels bookend Canada's Icefields Parkway: the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge to the north and Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise to the south.

The rustically elegant Jasper Park Lodge - undergoing a $6 million renovation scheduled to wrap up this fall - began as a luxury tented camp in 1915. It's now a 446-room resort with an award-winning 18-hole golf course on the shores of Lake Beauvert.

Lodge guests can rent bikes or paddleboats, kayaks and transparent canoes (my favorite) for a trip around the serene lake.

We could have easily spent a day here exploring without ever leaving the sprawling Jasper resort, but we had to hit the road early to give ourselves time on the parkway.

After a little more than 140 miles of driving, we arrived at a second Fairmont resort: Chateau Lake Louise.

Even a Porta Potty would look good on the shores of Lake Louise, but this regal-looking resort surrounded by a riot of colorful flowers - or blanketed in snow in the winter -is something to see.

It, too, had more humble beginnings, built in 1890 as a log cabin that would be "a hotel for outdoor adventurer and alpinist," according to the then-general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The railway was instrumental in developing some of the grandest hotels in Canada - many of them now Fairmonts.

One of the grandest of the bunch is less than an hour's drive south of Lake Louise in Banff, and that's where we spent the night after our day on the road.

Fashioned after a Scottish baronial castle, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel has a prime location tucked away in the heart of Canada's oldest national park.

The hotel's namesake hot springs are just a short hike from the hotel, whose Castello Ristorante serves Italian food as good as any I've had in Chicago.

Check Fairmont Hotels & Resorts' website, fairmont.com, for special packages, or call (800) 257-7544.