?How are we going to endure another two weeks of this?? I whispered to Annabel as I turned on the mattress with what seemed like inches of space above my nose. She couldn?t hear me above the ?BEEP, BEEP, BEEP? of a reversing dump truck. It was well past midnight.

The RV campground we were staying at consisted of downtown acreage that was now worth a fortune to developers. Because the building season is so short in the Canadian Rockies the condominium units were being thrown up 24-hours per day.

I had booked this commercial campsite in Canmore, just outside Banff National Park, so we?d be sure we had somewhere to stay on our first night out from Calgary.

The jackhammers and reversing trucks on the construction site aggravated an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia as I lay in our letter box above the cab of the motor home. Even if I wanted to, and I did, I couldn?t manoeuvre my way over Annabel to get out.

Being surrounded by a thousand RVs the size of Greyhound buses wasn?t exactly what I?d expected either. The only thing missing here was the shopping mall. There was barely enough room to squeeze between the RVs, some of which cost over a million dollars.

We had always had a disdainful attitude to motor homes, but attempting to work out the logistics of how to successfully spend a couple of weeks camping and hiking in Banff and Jasper National Parks with three-year old Elsa proved an overwhelming challenge.

It?s not as if there?s an unlimited supply of restaurants or motels or hotels in these huge parks and when a friend suggested renting a motor home it seemed the perfect solution.

We?d shuttle about like turtles, self-contained with all we needed: hotel room, restaurant and rental car all rolled into one. It didn?t come cheap mind you.

As much as we might have looked down on motor homes in the past, the RVing option of a 24-foot motor home wasn?t inexpensive at around $250 a day plus the campsite fees and mileage.

The next morning I threaded my way miserably amongst the leviathan RVs and around the construction site to the shower block some hundreds of metres away, put in a dollar coin and had a hot shower and a quite think before realising the fruitlessness of using the shower block.

We had our own perfectly good shower. As dedicated hikers used to carrying everything we needed in our backpacks, it was hard to get our heads around the fact that we were completely self-contained in our little home.

We didn?t need to plug in and hook up with the water supply, as I had frantically done within seconds of arriving at our parking site. Our motor home could function perfectly well for days without the life-support umbilical cords.

The next night we didn?t make the mistake of camping in a commercial RV campsite. We camped, or parked might be the operative word, at the Lake Louise National Park campsite.

While this campsite had some 700 campsites scattered in the woods, you?d hardly notice it, the area was the size of several football fields. We even had some 20 elk sitting in the tall grass around our motor home and Elsa spent hours making friends with them.

But we were also within a hundred metres of the main highway running through Banff and Jasper and once again, all night long, rather than the howling of wolves or the lunatic cries of the loons, the sound of massive dump trucks unloading boulders the size of VW Beetles permeated the night.

I wondered what we had let ourselves in for.

Banff National Park was the first of Canada?s national parks after railway workers stumbled upon hot mineral springs deep in a cave in 1883.

Today Banff National Park is part of UNESCO?s Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site. In the middle of peak season Banff National Park was justifiably teeming with tourists.

We headed further north on the Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefields where we took the mandatory photos of ourselves standing at the foot of the Athabasca Icefield on glacier ice tens of thousands of years old.

North of the Columbia Icefields into Jasper National Park, the traffic suddenly petered out and it was here that we finally had a sense of being in pristine wilderness.

Although we didn?t undertake any of the multiday backcountry hikes we did drive along roads and parkways providing seemingly endless mountain vistas.

And we did make increasingly ambitious day hikes above the tree line ranging from an hour to half a day and even got caught in a snowstorm at the top of the Whistlers.

At the end of our two weeks RVing holiday we didn?t want the holiday to end. We had sussed out how to use our little home to maximum advantage.

The technique was to stay at the small un-serviced provincial campsites where the behemoth RVs with their satellite dishes and Jeeps in tow couldn?t go.

Our stove operated on gas, and the fridge and hot water alternated between electrical supply and gas, depending on how much we had driven and how much juice was left in the batteries.

With all the interior lights on we never came close to depleting the batteries and we didn?t put a dent in the tank of natural gas on board.

Every two or three days we?d stop at a ?dump station? and empty the bilges and fill the internal tanks up with water for washing, showering and flushing the toilet.

By pulling into an un-serviced campground about mid-day we had the pick of the campsites.

We?d place the receipt on a small clipboard on our individual campsite and put the money in the supplied envelope into the steel box at the entrance to the campground and then we?d be free to roam, knowing we could come back to our choice campsite overlooking the lake.

Each afternoon we?d drive off to one of the day-hike trailheads where overnight camping isn?t allowed. These scenic trailheads are often at the foot of mountains or beside a lake but are closed at sunset.

Sunset in Jasper in the middle of summer isn?t until almost eleven at night so we?d do our late afternoon hike around the lake or up a mountain with Elsa, come back to an empty parking area and cook ourselves dinner.

Then we would read Elsa stories while looking out the window for trolls and abominable snowmen and bears and wolves and then when she fell asleep we?d tuck her in bed and enjoy the long evening over a glass of wine before putting her in her safety seat (while still asleep) and returning to our campsite.

A fortnight after that inauspicious start in Canmore and Lake Louise, we didn?t want our holiday to end and it was with a genuine sense of sadness that we left Jasper National Park to return to Calgary.

For anyone with young children, it?s a soft adventure holiday I?d highly recommend and the advantages are obvious. You don?t have to pack up each morning to move to yet another hotel room.

You simply get up, in your pyjamas if you want, get into the driver?s seat and turn on the ignition. With a motor home there?s a toilet, bed and water supply on hand whenever a child requires and perhaps most importantly, you can fill the fridge with healthy fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and fishes and eat whenever you want rather than stop to buy junk food or wait for a hotel restaurant to open.

Once you get used to the idea that you?re in movable home with everything you could possibly need, the adventures are unlimited.

As for the Canadian Rockies themselves? Their precipitous peaks and castellated tabletops rise abruptly and improbably out of forested valleys and turquoise lakes in a spectacular chain of vertical monoliths.

It?s an awesome sight to behold, even for Annabel and I who are habituated to the Himalayan scale of things. And Elsa? She still talks about the trolls, bears and abominable snowmen.

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For more photographs e-mail Andrew at www.awstevenson.com or AndrewSlogic.bm.