Of course you’re not, and who ever would have said you were?
[sub]Sorry![/sub]
Asimovian: If you come to Edmonton, I strongly suggest you drive up to 107th ave and 101st st, and have lunch or supper at the Thanh Thanh Oriental Noodle House. Have the hot satay beef soup and some lemongrass beef with rice. It’ll cost you about $25, but it’s enough food for two. It’s some of the best oriental food you will ever eat.
The only drawback is that for the rest of your life you’ll crave the hot satay beef soup.
The Wiki Travel Guide to Edmonton is very useful.
A second vote for dropping Calgary and Edmonton and seeing the icefields and Vancouver. Come again next time and make it an Alberta-only trip and see Calgary, Edmonton, and the Badlands - that would be easier and a lot of fun. But really, Vancouver, being bigger, has many more world-class things to see . The Stampede - meh. It’s a state fair with horses. Same rides, food, midway, etc. If you’re into rodeo, I suppose it’s fine but I imagine you can get rodeo aplenty back in your own home country without nearly the drive.
So I guess you’ll have to pick between seeing nifty natural stuff or cities and man-made stuff - depends which you enjoy more.
Maybe I’m jaded on the mountain thing, but I would hit the cities and forget about trying to find ALL the scenic points in the Canadian Rockies.
After Edmonton-Jasper stay on the Yellowhead highway straight down to Kamploops and on to Vancouver. Edmonton - Vancouver on that route can be done in 14 hours if you drive like a demon.
Yeah, you’ll miss the Parkway and the Icefields and Banff, but you WILL see lots of scenery. I personally will go to great lengths to avoid Banff which is very commercial. And I would go to greater lengths to avoid Highway 1 and the Rogers Pass and Revelstoke, etc… that is a very frustrating drive: too much traffic, too many semis and campers, too many hills and not enough passing lanes.
My .02
This makes sense. I won’t be heartbroken if I don’t make it up to Edmonton. According to Google, this will shave about 300 miles of driving off of my original trip, which apparently equates to about 5 hours of travel time by Google’s estimate. However, I think alice_in_wonderland makes a valid point that this still might not save enough time.
All of your concerns about making reservations mean that I have to decide something soon, though, so I’ll mull it over this weekend and come up with a final game plan. Please feel free to keep throwing things at me as you think of them, though.
As an aside, my wife finds this whole thing hilarious. I’m somewhat neurotic about planning, in that I tend to dive into things and try to almost micromanage entire vacation schedules ahead of time. She is nearly the opposite, showing a great preference for just seeing how things go. Although she does defer to me to some extent out of kindness, she does tend to balance me out quite a bit. However, since she has absolutely nothing to do with this trip, she’s amused to watch me fret over the whole thing without anyone reigning me in. 
Be advised that the sun sets at about 3 a.m. in those parts in July . . . ok maybe more like 10 p.m. 
And whatever you do, don’t j-walk. 
It is possible to get from Calgary to Vancouver in 10 hours. On the No. 1, that is. In ideal conditions. With no construction. Or accidents.
But that’s if you know the road really well, and take a maximum of 2 very short breaks.
(you have to know where you can speed and where you can’t.)