Approaching the mountains

We started the day with a short trip to Calgary downtown. Finding a parking lot isn’t as easy as we thought, but we finally made it. However, the parking lots are strange as well here: there was a railway going through it! Calgary’s downtown doesn’t have a lot of sights, so we just took a quick tour through it and visited the Devonian Gardens. That’s a park on the fourth floor of a shopping mall, hosting turtles, huge fish and even weddings. See our pictures in the Calgary photo album.

Another nice place to go is the Stampede, kind of a city where a big cowboy show takes place every year in July. Next to it we saw the Saddle Dome, home of the Calgary Flames hockey team. The sports show went on as we visited the Olympic Park with ski-jumping facilities, ski slopes and an ice channel. However, Calgary was not the most interesting place to be and so we went on to Banff Nationalpark.

Our plan was to have a quick look at the town of Banff and then camp near Lake Louise. But when we entered Banff it was love on the first sight. We parked near a river where people where hiking and canoeing. You can see this romantic spot in our Banff photo album. After entering downtown, we decided to stay in Banff overnight because of the nice wooden shops, houses and bars with the mountains in the background. We built up our tent in a campground near the town by daylight (we’ve got the last few places again) – however, the spot was in the middle of nowhere again, surrounded just by trees and wildlife.

Later that day, we went to a typical steak restaurant (Sirloin steak with fries and vegetables) and spent the night in the city. As you can see in our pictures, I found a job as souvenir doll. ;-) Finally, we used the visitor’s center WiFi to write a new entry for this blog!