My personal-life blogging has disappeared into a black hole lately so the next few days I’ll be playing some catch-up. First, some reflection on my recent trip to Calgary.

The point of this trip was to visit family, and for the most part it was just that. Most of the time was just spent sitting around or looking through photos or cooking. We probably ate in more than 50% of the time, and each meal was for nine people; so that was a lot of cooking!

The rest of the time seemed to be filled with going to malls. I’m not interested in that because the malls in Calgary are pretty much identical to the ones in Toronto; plus, I wasn’t shopping for anything. To be fair, there wasn’t much else to do. We walked for a couple of hours downtown, but it was too cold to walk outside so we stayed in the malls. We went to Calgary Olympic Park (COP), walked around to take some pictures and that was that. There was nothing happening at the Stampede and I guess watching the Calgary Flames would have been an option; but since they weren’t playing the Leafs it wouldn’t have been worth it.

There was skiing at COP which would have been a good idea, except I didn’t bring any skiing clothes. Oops. So I went around buying stuff, which was good because I needed some waterproof pants anyways. We schedule the day after we returned from Banff for skiing, but unfortunately Pauline got sick so we skipped that.

On New Years Eve, my aunt made roast beef, which would be good except that various parts of my family don’t eat beef. Also, she made it medium-rare which was fine, but various parts (which overlaps with the non-beef-eating part) of my family took exception to that and we ended up grilling it more (to at least make it look brown). Dinner took like 4 hours that night, so we ended up flipping through the TV for countdowns. The Toronto celebration was on “live” from Nathan Phillips Square but that was too ludicrous to watch, so we ended up on MTV’s Times Square countdown. Also, my uncle’s house has a nice view so after the New Year past, we were able to see some amateur fireworks.

We ended up increasing our suitcase count by 66% while there, mostly due to inheriting things, shopping (OK, I did find stuff to buy…), and Christmas gifts. That was a 2-birds-with-1-stone opportunity since we needed new luggage anyways. We bought Swiss (army?) brand ones, and were fortunate at that since one of them kind of ripped on the way back but we were able to replace it for free back in Toronto.

So overall it was a low activity trip. Things started picking up when we rented a car. It was a light bulb went off and we realized that we could have done a bunch of other stuff. I think we should have made a trip up to Edmonton instead of hitting the malls so often, but I guess that’s what another trip is for.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: calgary, diary, travelling