Rocky Mountain High, Alberta

I thought it would be years and years before I would get to see the Rocky Mountains with my own eyes. Turns out I was wrong! Because Derek is in Calgary on business for two weeks, his company paid to fly me out to see him last weekend, and what an awesome "mini-break" it was!

I flew WestJet, which I highly recommend, although I had to go out of Pearson as they won't begin operations from Waterloo until May 14th. It turns out that one of the little "trademarks" of WestJet is that they like to leave you laughing. On Friday, one of our attendants explained as we were taxiing into the Calgary terminal, it was International Star Wars Day: "May the Fourth be with you!" Hee!

Derek picked me up in the company-paid rental car (Chrysler 300C... niiiice) at the airport, and since it was pretty late, we just went straight back to the hotel and enjoyed a soak in the jacuzzi before bed. The Calgary Airport Country Inn is quite a nice place, actually. In addition to the hot tub, there's a pool, and a really nice exercise room. Derek had a suite, with a fridge, microwave, and coffeemaker, and of course, high-speed internet.

Saturday morning, he had business to attend to, so I had a very indulgent start to my day. I began with a workout, hot tub, and shower. Then came the excellent free continental breakfast. The best part was the waffles: they provided pre-measured portions of waffle batter and two preheated waffle irons to make your own fresh waffles! Absolutely decadent. I perused the complimentary Globe and Mail while I ate, then returned to the room to surf a bit until Derek came back with flowers. Such a sweetie.



In the afternoon, Derek was kind enough to drive me to Make One Yarn Studio, where I bought some luscious goodies I will blog about at a later date. I love my own LYS, but I sure was envious of Calgarians having access to such a wonderful store.

From there, we made our way to "Saltlik -- A Rare Steakhouse," passing by some neat public sculptures that I took pictures of and that you can see in my Flickr photoset of the trip. The restaurant was recommended by fellow knittyboarder Liza, and it was fabulous! The veal was quite possibly the most succulent cut of meat I have ever had the pleasure of eating.

Dinner was followed by a fantastic play, The Overcoat. The play was delayed 15 minutes, however, due to some real-life drama going on across the way at city hall that had caused traffic problems due to streets being blocked off by emergency vehicles. An armed man (although it turned out to be a pellet gun) claiming to have a bomb (he didn't) had a four-hour stand-off with police. Fortunately, the stand-off ended peacefully and no one was hurt. Everything was cleared up by intermission. Afterward, we walked down Stephen Avenue back to Saltlik for a late-night dessert of chocolate ganache cake ("molten lava" type cake, with berries and ice cream) for me, and cheesecake for Derek. YUM!

Sunday morning, we drove out to Banff. Strangely, all attempts to secure a Tim Horton's coffee for the road were thwarted. The first Timmy's we came to was temporarily closed. (The employees were milling around outside. No idea what was going on. Weird.) The second one was blocked off from us by construction. The third one had such a long line-up, we gave up, and made do with a McDonald's coffee and breakfast instead. (The coffee was surprisingly good, I must admit.) It took a long time to get out of Calgary, due to the roadwork on the Transcanada, but once we were outside city limits, it was smooth sailing. The Rockies kept getting bigger and bigger the closer we got, and within an hour of leaving Calgary, we had arrived in Banff. (We passed the town of Canmore on the way, and I couldn't help but hear the voice of the Royal Canadian Air Farce's late John Morgan introducing himself: "I'm Mike, from Canmore...") We only had a few hours in Banff, so we decided that the best use of our time would be to take the gondola up Sulphur Mountain and take lots of pictures, which are also part of the aforementioned Flickr photoset. Go look!