Day 16 - (08/03) Calgary, AB

Note: We're catching up for the time spent in Canada. This post was entered on 08/17.

We head into Canada today. Lake Louise and Jasper are our primary destinations, but we’ll stop in Calgary and Banff on the way.

It’s important to note that Carol, her parents and sister visited Glacier NP, Calgary, Banff, Lake Louise and Jasper over 50 years ago. It’ll be interesting to see how things have changed since then. Dick’s never been here.

We left the campground at 8:45am and got to Calgary around 2:00pm. There was no one in line when we went through Customs ... bet that doesn't happen very often. We saw some wind mills on the way, but nothing like the big wind farms in southwest US. There were beautiful plains and fields much like those we saw in Montana.

The fields seemed to stretch forever

We drove downtown after setting up the trailer. We could find none of the old town Carol remembers. Calgary is not the sleepy little town it used to be. It's grown to a sprawing, modern metropolis of over a million people!

Our campground is near one of the 1988 Winter Olympics sites. It’s currently a training center. We drove through the grounds on the way back from downtown.

Camp site

We're this close to the Olympic site

Bobsled Run

Olympic painting

Olympic ski jumps

We had a real awakening today. Our Verizon mobile broadband service works great here. Unfortunately, Canada applies a data transmission surcharge to the service cost. The Canadian charge for loading pictures to the blog today nearly equalled a month of broadband service. We won't be using the Verizon service while we're in Canada.

Map Tracks
Start: St. Mary, Montana
North on US-89 to US/Canada border
North on Alberta 2 to Calgary, Alberta
West on Trans-Canada Highway 1 to the Calgary West Campground
End: 193 miles @ Calgary, Alberta