Calgary continued:

Our weekend in Calgary turned out pretty fun and filled with adventure. Calgary is a pretty town, very green and there seems to be people enjoying the outdoors everywhere. There are little paths and all sorts of people are rollerblading, skateboarding, walking, jogging, etc. There are also groundhogs everywhere!! We drove through a lot of Calgary looking for places to eat and there seems to be a pub/bar/grill on every corner. They have the weirdest names to, so I started writing some of them down because they were so quirky and fun...here is a sampling: Loco Lous, Cat and Fiddle, Bottlescrew Bills, Megan's MisSTEAKS, Swine and Swig (with a big sign that says: Pork in rear), and the one we ended up eating at Magpie and Stump. (See picture below).

One day we went to the Calgary Olympic Park where the winter olympics were held. That was fun and free. Well, you could pay to ride the zipline and go up the lift, but we had no need to do that. There were a lot of people there because I guess they do the X-Treme games there and a lot of people were trick biking and practicing, but it was still cool. Above is the luge.

Here I am on a platform stadium, winning the GOLD!

Garry infront of the Olympic torch and all the countries flags behind him.

An olympic statue

Oh yeah, we did go up the hill and practiced our jumping...just like on Wii fit:)

Check out his form.

These were the ski jumps, pretty awesome looking, there is still a little bit of snow to Garry's right that didn't show up in this picture.

When we were driving back into town, we saw this crowd at Pete's Drive-in, we wondered what the heck was so good there to draw this big of a crowd (we had driven by the night before and it was actually huger, but we didn't snap the picture then),

Then we saw the sign, apparently they have good shakes, we had to be at the airport in an hour so we didn't stop, and we'd already spent all our canadian money and they only took cash, well, maybe next time.

Saturday, we spent the day in Banff, it is about 100 km from Calgary and is a national park. It reminded me a lot of Wallowa Lake, only I do believe that Wallowa was much prettier. Garry said it reminded him of Yellowstone, only Yellowstone is way better and has a lot more to do. We ate lunch in a Mexican Restaurant that someone from Garry's training had recommended. It was o.k., but really not the best I've ever had!
Right inside the door of the restaurant was...you got it...a magpie on a stump.

After lunch, we went up the Gondola, you can see it behind me and the mountain we're going to go up. We could hike up it (8.2 km), or take the gondola for $30.00.

They had a glacier that you could go tour, we didn't because it was another hour and a half away, but these are the glacier ice machines that they use to get around on it...they were massive!

On our way up.

Up on top, they had orange moss on everything, I thought it was funny, so I made Garry take of picture of me in front of Orange moss.

The view from the top.

They had a weather station that some guy hiked up to in the late 1800's for 43 years and lived up there and took notes on the weather and storms. He lived in the station that is what is behind us on the hill.

Once we got down the mountain, we drove around and we saw these mountain goats right outside our car window on a switchback mountain we were going up. We also saw a huge Mountain sheep ram, but couldn't stop until we were down the switchback, so he was too hard to get a picture of.

Here is Garry with the mountain we'd just been on with the gondola behind him.

We went to a famous sight called the Hoodoos, these are them, just giant rocks. The river below was green, I personally like my rivers blue, clear and sparkling.

We went to downtown Calgary and toured this mansion that was 14,000 sq. ft. It was built in the late 1800's and was home to a famous politician. The historical society had just aquired it four years ago and so it was in the process of being renovated and turned into a museum. It was cool looking on the outside.

It has four stories and only the bottom three were opened to the public. They had these gorgeous stained glass windows, this one of the elk was my favorite! They didn't have furniture in most of the rooms. It will be nice when it's all done. And that concludes our trip. We had a busy, fun weekend and got back Sunday night about 11 pm. It is nice to be home!