Canmore - Saturday

Last weekend was a long weekend in Alberta - Monday was Family Day.
(A political drug scandal resulting in a public holiday - I like it :-)


The Fowler family decided to take up the offer of the exchange teachers group and set off to Canmore to go dog sledding with the other Aussie teachers.
We hired a minivan since it was a rather long trip and we were giving Anna (an exchange teacher from England) a lift. Poor Bessie - I'm not sure if it was sulking or a sigh of relief I heard when we put her away in the garage :-)

So on Friday afternoon we packed up and headed off to Canmore. The van was a joy to drive compared to Bessie - it had cruise control, electric adjustable driver's seat, electric mirrors (well, just having mirrors was a novelty :-) and remote start.
(Remote start is a big thing in Canada - it lets you start your car and warm it up a couple of minutes before you leave your house/shop/restaurant/whatever)
With a stop for dinner in Red Deer, we finally arrived in Canmore a bit after 11:00. It was dark, we were all tired, and we just collapsed into bed.

When we woke up, this was the view from our room...



And the view from out the front...





I was blown away. The mountains in Canada are phenomenal! awesome! and pretty big too!

After dogsledding (don't worry, there'll be a separate post on that...) we wandered the streets of Canmore, checking out the shops, restaurants and laundromats.



(Ok, the laundromat just happened to be in that photo - I couldn't resist :-)

Oh yeah, all you Sydneysiders out there - you know about the Three Sisters at Katoomba right? Cop some of this - the Three Sisters at Canmore...



While in Canmore, we found the Canmore Civic Centre, where they were holding a bit of a festival thingy.





I think that the whale ice sculpture was a reference to the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, though I couldn't see a bowl of petunias anywhere.

Now you can't visit the Canadian Rockies without doing some lumberjacking. It was rather convenient that the Civic Centre had a log set up for the kids to cut.



They even let the kids keep the bit they chopped off :-)