Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Western Canada Diaries - 14. Calgary (Again)

[ Continued from Part 13 - Edmonton  ]

Returning to Calgary from Edmonton, we had a few days before leaving for Vancouver and Victoria. And you do need a few days to unwind from a Banff / Jasper trip. For one, there's so many pictures to sort and upload!

I had already covered Calgary's Olympic Plaza and a brief introduction to the city, so in this post I want to just talk about a few of the other places in and around Calgary that you can visit. I will also cover Drumheller in the next post.

Nose Hill Park is a huge park atop a hill in north west Calgary. It's a gigantic city park (almost 11 square kilometres) but the main attraction is that you can see all of downtown Calgary from one spot in the park. It's a nice viewpoint and we did explore a few of the trails, but mostly we came to take a picture of Calgary from here.



If you want a family shot with Calgary in the background, this is the place to come.


Chestermere is a small city by Chestermere Lake. The nice thing to do in Chestermere is just sit by the lake and enjoy the beautiful serene scene.


It's not the great glacier lakes of the parks, but it's only a fifteen minute drive from where we were staying.


The lake is also used in the summer for waterskiing, wakeboarding, fishing and other sports. It's a nice spot for a picnic (there are benches) or simply being lazy.


There's also a playground nearby, and a place with a lot of benches that you can lounge in and soak up the sun (if you are so inclined, we desis tend to run away from the sun).


Peace Bridge is a bridge over Bow River in Calgary. Yes, the same Bow River that begins in the Rocky Mountains and is part of the Bow Falls and the Bow Valley.


The bridge features the red and white colours, as red and white is present in both the Flag of Canada and the Flag of Calgary.


It's a pedestrian bridge but also has separate bike lanes. It's designed to be barrier free for those users who have challenges with mobility. The bridge opened to the public in 2012.


The red and white patterns make for interesting pictures and I had to wait a little bit to get a shot with no one in the frame. The things our families have to tolerate when they have a photo hobbyist amongst them!


The people of Calgary are an outdoorsy type when the weather allows them, and we saw quite a lot of boats and rafts on the Bow River as we were exploring the bridge. This trend would be doubled when we were visiting Vancouver. As a general trend, Western Canadians seem more sporty and outdoorsy than Ontarians. Maybe it has something to do with their beautiful landscape.


Calgary has some other attractions such as the Calgary Zoo, but as I said I wanted to explore sights that were unique to the city. You visit one zoo, you have visited them all, mostly. Calgary is also, as I said, quite huge and it takes a long time to drive from one part of the city to another.

Coming up next: Drumheller.

2 comments:

nadia said...

Love the color and design of the Peace Bridge! Yep, definitely no staying under the sun for us, except maybe for a few minutes :D

Salma - The Write Balance said...

I've visited Calgary myself but not with my family yet. It's definitely on our list.