While I admittedly have several other posts that should come before this one, I’d first like to tell everyone about my recent trip to Calgary.  It may seem a bit odd to vacation in September but personally, I prefer heading out of town during the off season.  When everyone is back in school or just generally getting back to the grind, I find it easier to get out and really enjoy myself.  After all, it’s so much quieter!  But, it’s not even that.  For me, it’s more interesting to see daily life in other places but you don’t see that when travelling in peek seasons.  Of course…we’re only talking about Calgary here.  And it was only a weekend trip.  But, even though I’ve been many times and have even lived there for a few years, it was still a nice change of pace for me.

I left Saskatoon on September 6th in my little car (which I will post about soon – I promise!) and headed off for the land of cows and oil.  After arriving and having some dinner, I had a chance to walk around the river bank a little with my brother who told me how things looked during and after the flood in June.  I watched the news everyday like so many of us and stared at disbelief at the images on the TV screen but walking along the river bank that I once knew so well, it’s hard to imagine that there was once such a devastating deluge ripping through the area.  Of course, those massive piles of rocks  that have piled into banks mid-river are an obvious clue that something odd happened but other than that and the odd wobbly path, everything looks the same.

Okay, not everything looks the same – at least, not to me!  The river is a nature source of a force of landscaping but humans are another and there has definitely been a lot of man made changes since I lived there many years ago.  Even since I last visited a few years back, there have been some significant changes.   Driving around the downtown core, I saw a lot of new buildings bursting out from between buildings that were once familiar to me.

Here are a few pictures I snapped that day: