We are settled in nicely at our hotel in Calgary Alberta.
Slept in this morning and then went downstairs for breakfast and to drop a load of laundry into the washing machine. That is another bonus for this hotel, it has a laundry room for guests. A lot of hotels do not have guest laundry and we have to load everything into the car and go in search of a laundromat.
The breakfast room is very large, there is a great selection of food and there are real plates and bowls, real cutlery, even real glasses and china mugs for coffee and tea. Not like most hotels where the food selection is very limited and they use paper plates, styrofoam cups and plastic cutlery.
After the laundry was done we walked from the hotel for about 10 minutes to catch the C-Train. The C-Train is Calgary’s rapid transit train that takes us into the downtown. There are 2 C-Train stops at the Stampede grounds. I am sure that starting tomorrow they will have to have more than 3 cars in the train.
Our mission today is to learn the system, how to obtain our day passes, what stops we will be using and just getting a general feel for how the system operates.
It is actually pretty simple, but there is always a learning curve to these things as each city is different. This is more of an honour based system, you buy your day pass from the machine at the station, however there is no system in place to verify that you actually have a pass. I suppose that an official could approach you and ask to see your pass and if you didn’t have one, that would be bad, but no one approached us to ask to see our pass. You just get on and off where ever you want. There must be some people who take the risk and don’t purchase a ticket.
We got off at the 7th Street stop and went in search of our bleacher seats for tomorrows parade. We found our seats easily and now we know we won’t have any problems locating them tomorrow in all the rush of people looking for their bleacher seats.
The downtown was very quiet today, but it will be a different story tomorrow.
We had lunch at Tim Hortons, then wandered around the downtown a bit more before getting back on the C-Train for the ride back to our hotel.
When we got off the train, on our walk back to the hotel, we stopped in at the Future Shop where I purchased a Mophie Juice Pack Air for my iPhone. With this device, it will double the battery life of my iPhone. The last thing I want to have happen is to be downtown Calgary or on the Stampede grounds and needing to look up something, or send an email or a text and discover that my battery is close to dying or dead. The juice pack is like having a second battery.
With that purchase completed, we walked to Wal-Mart and bought a few things we needed and then continued our walk back to the hotel.
We had dinner in our room this evening and will go to bed at a reasonable hour because we have to be awake at 6am for a quick breakfast and then catch the C-Train into town to our seats for the parade prelude that begins at 7:30 am with the actual parade beginning at 8:55 am.
That’s all for today from Calgary.
We didn't take very many photos, but you can see what we did take on FLICKR.
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