Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Canada Day 15: home time



We never fully unpacked in Calgary, as we were only here a couple of days, so packing this morning was quick and easy.

We weren't due at the airport till 5, and had to check out of the hotel by 12 noon, but they were kind enough to let us dump all our bags there while we had one last roam around the city.

It was a beautiful sunny day, so first of all we went for a nice long walk along the banks of the River Bow, on the hunt for a geocache. This was an unusual one, as it is indoors, in the office of the Calgary parks and recreation resource centre. They are well into caching, and keep a large ammo box in their premises, which is often visited and, being the closest decent sized cache to the city centre and therefore very handy for visitors, has become a bit of a favourite spot for travel bugs. It therefore seemed like an ideal place to drop off my hockeybug (whose mission is to visit all 30 NHL arenas in Canada and the US).



The young lady who worked in the resource centre was really friendly, and gave Connor a little keychain of a beaver with a Flames jersey on - what is it with everyone giving Cons pressies???. We bought $50-worth of cool ghost story books from her, so I guess that is a fair swap :)

We took the C-Train back to the Calgary branch of the Old Spaghetti Factory for lunch (food just as yummy as the Vancouver one), and then crossed the bridge onto Prince's Island to play for a while in the cowboy themed play park and say hello to some more of those Canadian black squirrels.


It seemed weird to see the river totally covered in thick ice and snow when it was so sunny and warm out. I guess when it has bedded in all through a long winter, it takes more than a couple of mild days to thaw it out....

After the swings it was up to the airport, and a long long flight home (we got back about lunchtime on Thursday, tired and ratty, but having had a lovely holiday)

And now the Canada blog is officially all done :)

Normal service will resume shortly....

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