Day out to Calgary, Alberta, Canada

4th July 2012 - Downtown Calgary, Alberta.

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We took a drive into Downtown Calgary before the throngs descended on it for the 100th Calgary Stampede Parade. There are lovely belts of greenery surrounding the city area.

It was a lovely sunny day, around 20deg. C - Calgary reminds me very much of Melbourne.

This covered walkway connects the Scotia Centre to The Core, a swanky shopping centre. On the 4th floor of The Core is a food court like no other - its called Devonian Garden, beautifully appointed with a glass (maybe perspex, I'm no architect) roof. The Stephen Ave Walk is where you'll find these 2 shopping centres.

 

Calgary is 3,438ft above sea level and has a population of around 1.2million. There is an air of purpose and vibrancy in this city...the global financial crisis appears to have a lesser impact on Canada.

A view of a another outstanding architecture....sorry about the dirty windscreen!

 

With a mix of ultra modern buildings and old (as seen in photo below), we love Calgary.

Calgary Chamber of Commerce building.

Many of the shop windows had these cute decals to celebrate the Calgary Stampede.

Another lovely old building in the background.

The Core...the top level is the Devonair Garden Food Court.

This is a housing estate on the City Limits...there are just hundreds of these double storey homes-all seem to be identically boring. They do however sit on high grounds which gave these ones views of the Canadian Rockies.

4th July 2012 - Cochrane

We love Cochrane!  Elevation: 3,891ft.  Lots of ranches that stretch for miles with cattle and horses.

We were also pleasantly surprised when we came across this Alpaca Ranch.

These alpacas had been recently shorn and they looked like full sized poodles.

Check out the different colours - we saw dark chocolate, golden brown, grey, beige and white ones.

Beautiful houses sit on the rolling hills of Cochrane. Think James Herriot in "All Creatures Big and Small" and you could almost be in the English countryside, just much nicer weather.

Approaching downtown Cochrane.  Cochrane sits at the base of Big Hill in the Bow River Valley. It is 18kms west of Calgary city limits.

The Home Quarter Mercantile & Pie Shoppe, downtown Cochrane. You can sit and play at this piano, the music sheet is provided!

Charming buildings dot the streets of Cochrane.  It is a fairly large town with about 17,500 people.

Canyon Rose Steakhouse ,there are quite a few eateries in this town.

Mackay's Home Made Ice Cream shop...the queue was long.

This iconic establishment has been around since 1948 and is still run by Jimmy MacKay's grand daughter, Meghan.

Edmonton to Cochrane/Calgary, Alberta, Canada

1st July to 3rd July 2012 - St Albert/Cochrane

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1st of July is Canada Day and as it was a long weekend and the weather was rather miserable, we took a drive around town and spotted these 2 wheat silos.

Tom noticed this home with the unusual garden landscape.

This lovely building is a restaurant. St Albert is apparently quite a well heeled suburb.

Monday, 2July turned out to be a brilliant day, 23 deg C. so we decided to find a golf course that was not solidly booked! We managed to get a game at the Terrae Pines Golf Course at quite a reasonable price for the two of us. We were not told the geese came with the package-what a lovely treat!

On the 5th hole, we came across several families of Canadian Geese and their goslings. It is a pretty course, however the fairways do need a lot of work. There are quite a number of water hazards, and unfortunately I gave up a ball to one of them.

This rabbit (I thought it was a hare but Tom thought otherwise) and as we could not turn him over to check, don't know if its male or female either.

It was on the 6th hole in the rough where Tom's ball had landed.

We saw Al's big brother at the RV Park - Al is 29ft long with 2 slide outs. This Alpenlite is 31ft. Another 2ft of space and 3 slide outs (drool, drool) - when your home for 3 months is on wheels...size does matter!!

What a change in the weather - we returned to the RV Park at around 4pm and we could hear thunder rumbling and the wind started picking up.

By 8pm, the sky was so ugly with ominous and forebodingly dark clouds. Tom was concerned about hail stones and I was thinking more a "Dorothy and Toto" scenario.

Luckily we only got the strong winds but not enough for a remake of the movie.

We left Edmonton at around 7.50am today, 3rd July. It was a rather chilly and grey 13deg. C. We defied the nightmare route that was the Anthony Henday Drive and managed to navigate to Hwy 2 bound for Calgary without much hassle-we ignored the GPS.

Once again it was a pretty ordinary drive with lots of ranches and acres and acres of billiard table like grass with nice juicy steaks on four legs contently chowing down. Its quite amazing the size of some of these ranches.  We saw quite a few horse ranches as well.The view got better once we passed through the town of  Airdrie.Lush green rolling hills and we saw a view that has become familiar to us on this trip...the Canadian Rockies in the distance.... bliss...

We are staying at the Spring Hill RV Park, Cochrane and will use it as our base into Calgary for the Calgary Stampede..yee haw!!

It has reached a "balmy" 16 deg. C and the wind is howling like a banshee.

Pulled into the parking lot of the Spring Hill RV Park to check in and who should I see... another of Al's brother. He is even bigger than the 31footer.... The Park is already quite busy with Class A Motor Homes flying the American flag..guess they are here for the Stampede as well. 

West Edmonton Mall, Alberta Canada

29th June 2012 - St. Albert, Edmonton - Alberta

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We finally found St Albert and the Kinsmen RV Park.  This lovely clock tower sits at the junction of Sir Winston Churchill Road and Grenier Rd.  The buildings with the light green roofs are apartments-I thought they were unusual. 

Well, if the Canadian Rockies are nature's showpiece, then the West Edmonton Mall is an architect's showpiece. Yes...it is a ship inside the Mall - this is the Sea Lion's Rockpool.  There are 2 sea lion shows twice a day, there are also paddle boats for the littlies.

Another cool entertainment - suspension bridges, good way to burn up the kids' energies in winter.

The Mall is beautifully appointed-this section has lovely old style shop fronts.

Ice world - they have seasonal ice hockey games played here as well a normal ice skating.

No, we didn't eat here..Tom might have gotten distracted from his food. We met up with my brother Chris and his  family for dinner at the Mall and the girls are only 11 and 13, so not suitable for them.

We found 2 food courts at the Mall - one was more upmarket with the likes of Tony Romas, the above Red Piano and I suppose I have to include Hooters as they were in the same food court. The other had the usual Mexican, Chinese, Japanese fast food style outlets.

The Carousel is in Galaxyland-one for the family. The Carousel is not the only ride in Galaxyland.

Water world - check out the water slides. 

My brother and his girls went on or should I say in them and had a ball.

Now this one is Insane!! The g force turns and the noise of the rollercoaster screaming inches away from me had me screaming - and I wasn't even on the ride!!

This is my niece Faith...that's her telling her Uncle Tom he's so "huggable". (we just had dinner).   I don't know if that's good or bad the huggable bit I mean. They were leaving the next day to Golden then back to Vancouver.  There was a substantial landslide at Revelstoke which stopped their trip to Golden so they had to replan their vacation and do Edmonton first and Golden on their return journey. We were lucky that we were a few days ahead of the landslide and floods that have affected the small townships before Golden. 

Took this on our way to the Mall.  Had to stop for the train to past and this guy nonchalantly got out of his car and in front of all of us took relief...what a class act or not! Lesson here - don't shake hands with people, never know what they've been doing prior. Uugghh.

Hinton RV Park and Area, Alberta, Canada

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25th June to 28th June 2012- Hinton KOA RV Park

The Jasper/Hinton RV Park is franchisee of KOA (Kampgrounds of America). It seems to be a very popular stopover for folks coming in from Jasper and on their way to Edmonton and east. There was a queue 8 Motorhomes deep at around 5pm on one day, all waiting to check in.

It was a well laid out RV Park, surrounded by ranches and private homes. Tom found the showers to be really good. The cost of laundering was also quite reasonable.

The Rv Park also offered self contained cabins.  They even supply a BBQ, check out the unit in front of this cabin.

Prairie Creek Ranch-one of the ranches around the park.

These horses belong to the ranch-beautiful black stallions.

This friendly guy came right up to me but when I tried to stroke him, he turned shy.

Hinton to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

29th June 2012 - Hinton to Edmonton

Boring......we left Hinton at around 8.15am for Edmonton. It is just one dead straight boring drive.

Managed to get a shot of this herd of Bisons grazing on a farm.

Although the drive was boring, our problems began when the highway ended and we got onto new roads into Edmonton that were not in the GPS.  This is a lovely house that I took a pic of as we drove around trying to locate our rv park in St Albert.

There is so much road construction going on in Canada at the moment, some of the roads have been opened only the last 6 months with much rerouting.  Our GPS just did not have the data even though we had updated the database before we left Oz.  It can be quite harrying if you end up in a housing estate that have very tight turns, dead ends and you are trying to manouevre a 29ft 5th wheel! It is white knuckle driving!