Oh Canada!

When I was a freshman at BYU, one of my roommates in Heritage Halls was a very fun girl from Alberta, Canada. After two semesters of living with Jacquie, I knew what a garborator was, I knew how to say "eh," and I wanted to go visit Alberta and see if it was as beautiful as she said it was. Almost twenty years later, I finally got my chance.

Earlier this month, Jeff had an academic conference to go to in Calgary, and I tagged along. (Actually, I've been planning this for a year.) There were all kinds of good reasons. Jeff's hotel room and car were paid for, so we just had to buy a plane ticket for me. We were due for an overnighter without kids. I can only think of two we've had since Adam was born almost nine years ago. And we are coming up on our 15th anniversary, so I figured I could justify it as an early celebration. It was wonderful! We definitely need to have getaways like this more often. Jeff's parents were kind enough to tend for us, so I didn't have one worry about the kids (although I did miss them a tiny bit :-). While Jeff was in his conference sessions, I kicked back in the hotel room and read a couple books--something I don't get to do very often. I also explored downtown Calgary a little, although it wasn't much fun to do by myself. My favorite thing was the Devonian Gardens, an indoor arboretum above a three-story mall. And we ate several good meals, the best of which was at the Silver Dragon in Chinatown, about two blocks from our hotel.

After Jeff was done with his conference on Saturday, we took off on the Trans-Canada Highway up into the Canadian Rockies. Originally we had planned to go to Banff and Lake Louise, but one of Jeff's colleagues suggested a less touristy route, and Jeff was all for that. We ended up driving south through the mountains on Highway 40. The scenery was beautiful! We stopped several times and took as many pictures as we had battery power in our camera--I had three sets of batteries that all died, and two sets of rechargeables that weren't charged--argh! The last of our batteries and the light died about the same time, so we headed back up the road to find some dinner in Canmore. We had a simple but entertaining meal in the bar of a Boston Pizza. All the tables were full in the restaurant, and a Calgary Flames-Vancouver Canucks hockey game was showing in the bar. Since we didn't have kids along and we were hungry, we opted for an available table in the bar. Watching the game was fun, but watching the fans was even more fun. There was one guy at a table near us that talked hockey with another guy for at least an hour-and-a-half straight while they watched the game. (He reminded us of Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite.) I don't think the two guys even knew each other. And I'm sure I didn't hear more than three words from their wives the whole time. (They must have been wives. I don't think any two guys would ignore their girlfriends so completely!) Anyway, we enjoyed our meal, our waters (the waitress was probably disappointed with our tip), and the entertainment, and I felt like somehow I'd had a completely Canadian experience.

On Sunday we got a nice little tour of Calgary in an effort to find a chapel where we could watch General Conference. I had a map to the stake center closest to our hotel, but hello--it was closed for remodeling. That particular bit of helpful info wasn't available on the Church web site. We found a phone book and I wrote down addresses for two more chapels that we thought we could find. We didn't have a very detailed map, so it was a little tricky, but we found them, complete with no cars in the parking lots and no satellite dish at either one. It took a trip back downtown to a mall with free Internet to figure out where another stake center was. We made it there in time to watch the Sunday afternoon session, then went straight to the airport for our flight home after a very nice weekend. My only regret was that we didn't have time to drive up there and back. I would have liked to have seen the Cardston Temple and Waterton Park (where Jacquie worked summers) on the way.