Calgary: The New West

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A Travel Guide To Calgary Canada

While Cass and I were away, my brother moved to Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his wife. I’m psyched about this move for him for several reasons 1- it’s loads closer to Montana (a 6 hour drive) 2- maybe now he’ll understand why I love the mountains 3- I have a great chance to hang out in the Canadian Rockies. With the extra free time that we’ve got now that we’re back here in between jobs, I headed up here with Denali, my video camera, and my skis for a long weekend.

Yes, video camera. Filling up this free time has given me a chance to unleash my creative juices, and more importantly, actually complete some of the projects that have been floating around my head for some time. That being said, I grabbed my flip video camera and began putting together a travel video on the city of Calgary. It was a first attempt at this kind of thing and it turned out fairly good, so this will give me some encouragement to explore a little more into this kind of stuff. It’s fun to put these together and they have a good chance at complementing my writing. Here’s the site I posted it on, A Video Guide To Calgary Canada , and I've figured out how to post it here under the text- just click on that and, bam, you have the video.

I’ll save you reading a long blog post, just head over to the video and check that out. I’ll just give you a little run down of the weekend.

1) Drove 7 hours with Denali- ROAD TRIP!
2) Sara and I became all kinds of tourists- heading downtown to the Calgary Tower, Crave cupcakes, Eau Claire Market, and Stephens Avenue. This was certainly cool for me, I found a surprisingly hip downtown core with a very international influence. Besides, Sara hasn’t really had a chance to do this kind of stuff yet, so I was her excuse to do all this- and get some great footage besides.
3) Skied Canada Olympic Park and night. This was a dinky little place just outside of town, but had the ski jumps used in the 1988 Olympics, so that was pretty cool.
4) Skied Sunshine Village Resort- awesome powder, amazing resort, breathtaking terrain just outside of Banff. The coolest little mountain town in Canada.
5) Skied Nakiska Resort- this hill is a bit closer to town than Banff and held all the skiing competition for the Olympics. I believe Alberto Tomba was the king of the mountain that year.
6) Ate monstrous steaks.
7) Yet another tense interaction with U.S. Customs- reminds me of a quote I over heard in the Macau customs line, “U.S. Customs is the scariest place I’ve ever been.” True.

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