Flying and driving from Whitehorse to Kelowna and Calgary
I’m now on Day 5 of a trip to see family members in southern British Columbia and Alberta. I haven’t taken very many photos (185 so far, 70 of them in a single car museum 🙂 ) but I’ll show you some of the places I’ve been.
This was the view out my window at 05:30 on Thursday – not a bad day to be leaving Whitehorse.
It’s less than 15 minutes to YXY, and crowds are seldom a problem at the airport.
As home airline, Air North gets the single air ramp, while we boarded the Jazz (now Air Canada Express) CL-600 out on the tarmac.
Two hours to Vancouver, and a 2-hour wait for the next flight, 50 minutes to Kelowna on a Dash 8.
Over the lower Fraser Valley, which I barely recognize much of now after 22 years away.
I picked up a rental car from Budget at the Kelowna airport, then spent a night with my parents. I arrived on my 61st birthday, and my sister and her husband came over to help us celebrate with a Dairy Queen cake – yuuuuum!
On Friday morning I headed east. The first stop was at Revelstoke for lunch with my oldest brother. There’s just never enough time on these trips 🙁 Then through the main spine of Rocky Mountains, where I hit snow (as expected). The ambulance and police cars leaving Golden hinted strongly that someone behind me hadn’t navigated it successfully.
It was a 10-hour trip to see my son and his wife. This is their view – they’re just outside Stettler, a small farming town a couple of hours north of Calgary.
At noon Saturday I headed south again, passing the huge gas plant at Joffre. I was with my daughter and twin granddaughters just after 2:00.
Sunday was our Explore Calgary day. The Gasoline Alley Museum was a must-see, of course.
The museum has an excellent collection, including some exceptionally rare vehicles such as this 1909 McIntyre Model M, believed to be the only restored example in existence.
It’s too bad that most of Heritage Park was closed – after the museum and lunch, we drove downtown.
Sweet! We don’t see many Ferraris in Whitehorse 🙂
Along Memorial Drive we found this impressive display. There are 2,700 crosses along the road, each bearing a soldier’s name, age, rank, who they served with and the date they died. All of these men and women were from Alberta and all died in active duty.
A donation of $100,000 from businessman Murray McCann funded this project, and volunteers install the crosses. This is the 3rd year it’s been done – the first year there were 600 crosses, then 1,600 in 2010.
From there we walked across a footbridge to Prince’s Island Park and spent most of the rest of the afternoon there.
What could be more fun than rolling your sister down a big hill?!? 🙂
We were all surprised to see thick ice on some of the water.
I wanted to see Calgary’s “Occupy” protest, so we drove to Olympic Plaza. It was built for medal presentations during the 1988 Winter Olympics, and is now a popular site for many public events.
It’s a fairly small protest compared to what’s happening in some cities.
“The system” is obviously working very well for many people in Alberta (as it is for me), which could be why it’s so quiet.
Calgary has become a very attractive city over the past 30 or so years in particular – we saw an ad for a condo overlooking Prince’s Island Park for just over $4 million. Even the sewer covers are attractive 🙂
This is what we woke up to this morning! We dropped the girls off at school and came back home. Once the morning traffic rush is over, I’m going to do some more exploring around town.
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