Since both Edie and Eli were pretty dirty after a couple of weeks frolicking in streams and mountains, we looked yesterday for a place to give them a bath. One of the places we came across on the Internet offered not only baths and clipped nails, but also extremely reasonable rates for day care. Since John and I wanted to do some museums and other places where we could not take the beasts, we thought it much better to leave them to play with other dogs than to stick them in the car in some underground parking garage. So our first order of the day today was to take them to the DogCity Dog Wash. The dogs were greeted at the door by about a dozen other canines including another black Bouvier! It only took Edie and Eli a moment before they were smiling and making play bows.
Leaving DogCity, we went back to our Bed and Breakfast where we had breakfast. One of the pleasures of staying at this kind of accommodation, as opposed to a motel or hotel, is that you get to meet the other guests at meals. We met an older man from Chester, England who had been cycling through the Rockies with his much younger Asian wife. There was also a couple from Switzerland who had been traveling through the the Yukon and the wild northern parts of BC. We had a very filling English style breakfast including bangers! Our host, Jonathan, was born and raised in Liverpool and he retains both his Scouser accent and his culinary heritage.
After breakfast, we planned a day of exploring central Calgary. The city of Calgary is laid out on a grid mostly, and the numbering system makes it pretty easy to not get lost. Avenues run east-west and streets north-south. The grid breaks the city into four quadrants: northwest, southwest, northeast, and southeast. So a typical intersection, like that nearest to our bed and breakfast, would be 25 Ave SE & 2 St SE. Because of this, we felt pretty comfortable just walking around without fear of getting hopelessly lost. We walked towards an older neighborhood still shaded with elm trees. On the second floor of one older home, we found someone who had placed this fiberglass statue on his porch.
Calgary was a cattle town before it became an oil town, and there is still a lot of nostalgia for its wild west heritage. The biggest event of the year is the Stampede, a rodeo which brings tens of thousand of visitors to the city at the beginning of each summer. The Calgary police also wear big black Stetson hats. So placing a big cow on your porch is not quite as humorous as it might be somewhere else. It can be simply a recognition of your heritage.
Our first stop on this walk was an Alberta Heritage site, the home of Senator James Lougheed.
Lougheed was one of those bigger-than-life westerners. As a young lawyer, he moved to Calgary in the late nineteenth century when there was little else here than the main garrison of the RCMP. He married a half-Inuit woman whose father held an important position in the Hudson Bay Company. There was no province of Alberta at that time, and the northwest territories had only recently been ceded from the Hudson Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada. With boundless ambition and good connections, Lougheed prospered and not only built this house but led the drive to create the province and admit it to Confederation.
The building has suffered a lot of neglect over the years, and for several decades it was simply the blood donation site for the Red Cross. But recently a community foundation has taken it over and is slowly restoring the rooms to their original Edwardian state.
After leaving the Lougheed house, we walked towards the Bow River and the Eau Claire Market. I knew very little about the market other than the fact that it showed up routinely on lists of things to see and do in Calgary. We probably would have been disappointed in it – the market is sort of a fake enclosed market like the English built everywhere in the mid-nineteenth century – but outside the “Taste of Calgary” was going on. We have seen other of the “Taste of …” events and been unimpressed, but this one actually had real local restaurants and breweries proudly showing off their best stuff. We were sorry we had had such a big breakfast and were not hungry at all because everything looked and smelled so good!
There was also live music. A pretty decent Celtic band was playing when we were there.
The Taste of Calgary was being held on one of the many parks that line the edge of the Bow River. Nearby, in the middle of the river, is Prince’s Island, a charming park with stunning views of downtown Calgary.
Calgary gets a lot of winter and almost all the major buildings downtown are connection by the +15 walkways. This system, named for the fact that each walkway is about 15 feet above street level, allows you to walk through downtown in the middle of the winter in shirtsleeves. It’s can also be much faster than walking at street level because you never have to wait for a light to turn. Our destination was the Calgary Tower. Much like the Seattle Space Needle, the tower is simply a big observation platform with a rotating restaurant. John figured that it was not worth paying the money to go to the observation deck, but for the same price we could probably have a salad and a diet coke at the restaurant. Alas, when we arrived they told us that they had already taken all their reservations for lunch. So we passed on the tower, though not before John had a little opportunity to pose.
From the tower we went to the Glenbow Museum. This museum was founded by Eric Harvey, a Calgary man who had had either the foresight or the sheer dumb luck to purchase the mineral rights to much of the province before oil was discovered in 1947. After the resulting oil boom made him one of the richest men in Canada, if not the world, he decided to spend his fortune on a variety of philanthropic enterprises including a first-class ethnographic museum in his hometown. The Glenbow Museum not only has a huge collection of First Nations art and artifacts, but his similar items from countries throughout the world. In addition, it has spaces to special shows and traveling exhibits. We found the information on the Plains Indians quite informative.
There were also shows highlighting other ethnic and cultural groups from various parts of the world. There was one exhibit highlighting the art of sub-Saharan Africa. Along with all the traditional pieces were some modern bits of folk art. We liked this advertisement for hair care.
But what we really liked was a temporary show called “Alberta Mavericks” which illustrated the history of the province through examining the contributions of a variety of notable Albertans, some well-known and some who would be unfamiliar even to Alberta natives. It was great social history. The Rocket sign for Telstar Drugs was a local landmark.
From the Glenbow we walked down Stephen Street for a bit. Officially called 8 St SW, Stephen Street – its name fore the grid system was imposed – is a pedestrian mall. Most of these pedestrian streets in the United States are dismal urban renewal failures. Stephen Street, however, is a vibrant public space. This is the only part of downtown where the historic nineteenth century buildings have not been torn down, and today they house trendy restaurants and mostly expensive shops. I say “mostly expensive” because there was one discount place where John stopped and bought me another new shirt.
We walked from Stephen Street back to DogCity to pick up the beasts. They were happy to see us! Both of them looked and smelled to clean. We walk back to the bed and breakfast and when they arrived in the room they just plopped on their bed and fell asleep.
Tomorrow we leave Canada and begin the journey back to Los Angeles.
