Category: Calgary

Mazatlán- Getting There – The Calgary Part

User:Qyd:Qyd, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

This year’s adventure to Mazatlán began on December 29 with a stay at the former Wyndham Garden Hotel. Now a Hotel 11. As always, we chose to stay at an airport hotel because the flight departs in the morning. We have stayed at this hotel several times as it has a good restaurant and is in great shape. Since our last stay, Wyndham sold the property to Sonesta Hotels, who have branded it as Hotel 11. A great rate, excellent service and the same great food. Our rate for the night was $151.95, tax in. Had a few vino’s, so supper almost matched the room rate. Our bad. Check them out at the link; it’s recommended.

Hotel 11, MOD Sonesta – Calgary Hotel with Airport Shuttle | Sonesta

The next step is the flight.  As usual, we flew in on WestJet.  It is pretty much the only game in town from Calgary.  There is Sunwing as an alternative, but they are now owned by WestJet and have some limitations that are not good for us. It is cheaper, but one-way travel is not allowed, and changing flights is next to impossible.  As we are there for 3 months or so, this restriction is not a good thing.  We book as one way in each direction instead of round trips to give us the flexibility to head home earlier or later, especially for urgent personal reasons.

We caught our shuttle and arrived at the airport with a 3-hour window.  As we check in online, we ditch the lineups at the counters and proceed directly to the self-check-in kiosks.  We generated our bag tags, dumped our luggage at the baggage chute, and headed into security.  Security can cause a hiccup or 2, but we sailed through and headed for breakfast.  The Tim Hortons and Starbucks are always full, so we use the Vin Room in case we want a mimosa or a nice chardonnay at 8:00 in the morning (You have to love air travel).   The buzz in airports is unique.  People everywhere around are excited, nervous or bored.  Sitting in a restaurant eating breakfast and people-watching is a great way to kill time before boarding.  The Vin Room is a Calgary restaurant/wine bar with 3 locations; this (obviously) is the airport location.  Food is good and reasonably priced for an airport.  The service is excellent as well.  Breakfast was around $50.00, with tips and taxes and no wine.  Another recommendation to check out if you are flying out of Calgary. Check them out at the link below.

Vin Room

Photo by Timur Saglambilek: https://www.pexels.com/photo/wine-glass-bottle-87224/

Zoolights 2023

Each year the Calgary Zoo transforms into a sea of Christmas lights. There are over a million lights and 250 figures. It is quite the display as seen in the shots I took. All pictures were taken on my iPhone 13.

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

A Beautiful Sunset In Calgary

Was out for a stroll and had to take this shot over one of the lakes in our part of Calgary. Gorgeous colours.

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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.

Celebrating The First Deck Beer Of The Year

Put this up on the wrong place lol

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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A Beautiful Winter Day In Calgary

Had a beautiful walk today. Cool, crisp and clear.

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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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