Category: Calgary

Fish Creek Provincial Park – Calgary, Alberta, Canada


Discovered this park in the centre of Calgary and will share a few photos.  A beautiful walk in an area surrounded by a million people.

A Dog Day Afternoon
A Dog Day Afternoon
Fish Creek Swimming Hole
Fish Creek Swimming Hole

Only In Calgary


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Another reason to love Calgary. Check out this forecast. Rain and plus 5c changing to an evening thunderstorm with plus 3c. Then to complete the trifecta, we have snow overnight and minus 5c. Don’t see that every day.

The Skaters Of Calgary


You may remember my post on the Skaters of Seville, if not it is here.  There was another reason for our interest (insert parental pride here).  That is the talents of our sons as aggressive roller-blading.  Basically, like doing skateboard type tricks, but on roller blades. I bring this up as our youngest popped a video on Facebook which made think of, first, Seville, and second, how good he is on his skates.  Take a moment and watch the video.

Pretty cool.  Wish I was still agile enough to do that.

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To Sail Or Not To Sail – Now What


As I noted in the earlier post, To Sail Or Not To Sail – What we Did On Our Summer Vacation, we have made the decision to explore the feasibility of retiring on a sailboat.  Having made that choice, we hit the first hurdle, which is simply put as “Now What”.

Our first step was to visit a sailing shop of some sort.  These are fairly rare when you live in an area without access to your typical sailing venues.  We are kind of landlocked with no big lakes close by, which is not really a good thing.  We did find a shop (Glenmore Sailboats) in Calgary and popped in for a visit.  Very friendly place and very willing to discuss sailing and live-aboard.  As first moves go, this turned out pretty well.  We asked questions, he answered.  We asked where people sailed in the area and he listed off 4 places.  These are Chestermere Lake, Glenmore Reservoir, Ghost Lake and Newell Lake, Alberta.  We now had some places to check out.  We asked about lessons and he recommended the sailing school at Glenmore Reservoir.  We asked about live-aboard and if people actually do what we were thinking.  The answer was a resounding yes.  He knew of many people who do it.  Some succeed, some don’t, which makes complete sense.  Preparation is key.

We left feeling pretty good about things, other than the answers creating even more questions.  I’ll leave that to later and concentrate on our next moves.  Lori arranged lessons on the reservoir through the Calgary Sailing School.  These were to start on June 1 and were on Lasers.  I’ll leave that experience for the next post.

Glenmore Reservoir in Calgary
Glenmore Reservoir in Calgary (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At this point, we now know that we are going to seriously look at this, that it is doable as people do it all the time.  We immediately went into lala land and started casing out costs and boats.  I was shocked.  Check this one out.

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Pretty impressive living space.  The pricing is amazing to.  Sailboats in this class can go for anywhere from $75-125,000.  The other part we looked at was living costs including maintenance.  This is where it gets hairy.  We have read that you can do this for anywhere between 500 and 5,000 a month.  Both ends I see as extreme and the most common number I see is 3,000.  The idea suddenly becomes a bit less crazy.

I’ll leave off here and take you to our adventures on Glenmore Reservoir on my next post.

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Janice and Kirk Come To Calgary


My sister Janice and her husband Kirk (they just retired so I’m kind of pissed at them) popped out for a quick visit with us over the Canada Day long weekend.  We did a bit of sightseeing with them before they headed off south into Montana.  I have decided to name this the Great Calgary Wildlife Tour.

Murriettas

We did an afternoon in downtown Calgary.  You can get a nice drink and a stupendous view of Calgary’s downtown wildlife from this perch on Stephen Avenue.  A great place for people watching.

We did a run out to Banff and Lake Louise.  On the way we saw a moose, but could not stop to take a picture.

Bow Valley Parkway Bear

As we pulled out of Lake Louise and onto the Bow Valley Parkway, I spotted something in the ditch, a flipping bear.  I pulled over to the shoulder to try to get a picture.  Please note the car to the right.  This is a panic-stricken idiot of a tourist who decided to stop in the middle of the freaking highway.  Also note the oncoming car moving at 60 miles per hour.  Also note that the fool was blocking our view and could only shoot out the rear window.

Bow Valley Trail Sheep

As we continued on, we came up on a line up of traffic.  It was like the drive through at Tim Horton’s on a weekday morning.  As we inched our way along, I soon saw what the hold up was.  A Bighorn Sheep on the side of the road.  Once we got up to it, I literally stuck my phone out the window and took a picture.  The pavement edge is in the bottom right corner.

Bow Valley Parkway Elk

Our next stop up the road was at a spot where about 30 vehicles were pulled over.  We looked, couldn’t see anything and then noticed the elk, way back in the forest.  Kirk hopped out and headed for them.  He got the shot from afar.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they wander the streets in parts of Banff.

To sum up the day, we got pictures of 2 elk, 1 bear, 1 bighorn sheep and 3 beer drinkers.  We didn’t get shots of 1 moose, a bald eagle and many gophers.  A pretty good day.

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A Nice Day For A Skate


We went for a skate the other day at Bowness Park in Calgary.  Unfortunately we couldn’t skate through the forest as that portion of the creek was closed due to thin ice.  We did skate on the lake for a while though.  Lots of fun.  Took the movie with my iPhone.

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