48-hours in Alberta, Canada
Posted on 20 July 2011 with 5 comments from readers
Of course this is not nearly long enough to experience the great Canadian outdoors and Wild West feel of Alberta but you can pack in quite a lot with some forward planning.
We flew into Calgary late in the evening and stayed overnight at the relatively new Acclaim hotel just two kilometres from the airport. That made it easy to take a bus or taxi from the airport the next day to the Calgary Stampede to watch the rodeo show and the accompanying agricultural show and fun fair.
Calgary Stampede
It depends on your preference but we found a few hours enough and dodged the fast food to catch the Brewster bus to Lake Louise, the highest town in Canada with a beautiful turquoise lake surrounded by some serious mountains and six glaciers.
Avoid the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise with its small rooms without air-conditioning, and long wait-lists for breakfasts, bars and dinners. The service in this hotel could do with a major management review.
Whatever would major shareholder Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed think of this hotel? It certainly falls way short of anything else we have experienced in the normally first-rate Fairmont empire.
Not that the hotel is short of facilities or fine restaurants. It is just the Soviet-style queues that annoy, especially when you can see people being told to wait 25 minutes for breakfast when there are seats empty in the restaurant. A busy weekend yes, an excuse for such poor service in a $500-a-night hotel no.
Scenic hiking
However, the hotel is an excellent base for exploring the hiking trails that can take you up to 7,500 feet, just remember to pack the right footwear. The views are spectacular.
Our advice would be to stay nearby, say in the excellent Caribou Lodge in Banff and take a hire car up to Lake Louise to do the hiking. This hotel costs about a third of the Lake Louse Fairmont and you do not have to wait in line for anything. Indeed, the hotel could not do more to please.
But don’t miss this scenery if you have only 48-hours in Alberta. Our next stop is the RockyMountaineer luxury train from Banff to Vancouver. Watch this space!
5 Comments posted by readers:
The problem with the crowds was your timing. I can remember going to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming during the 1970’s. It was the last vacation I took with my parents. We had seen all the pictures on TV of the huge traffic jams and big crowds everywhere. We arrived in early September, after all the kids had returned to school. Back then, kids started school in early September because they didn’t get many days off during the school year.
Anyway, the park looked semi deserted. There were people people around the big attractions like Old Faithful, but it was a couple of hundred, not a thousand. We hiked to the Artist Paint Pots and only encountered a few other people. It was like having your own National Park. We had to keep talking so as to not surprise any grizzle bears. I can remember when we stopped for a picnic at a roadside picnic area. I think about 12 cars passed the whole time we were eating. We stopped at some concession stand. It was closed. It was actually kind of spooky. I have been to all the big National Parks in the USA. None, in my opinion, can touch Yellowstone. Standing at the edge of the Lower Falls and watching the Yellowstone River drop 310 feet is some experience, as is the view down the Yellowstone Valley with the River running down it. The colors are amazing. The thermal features are other worldly. I can still remember how I felt when I read the plaque on the redwood tree that was still standing there having been growing at that same spot 50,000,000 years ago, and now turned into rock. There aren’t any redwood trees around there now. To think that it grew there shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct, before anything like apes had evolved, had been buried by volcanic eruptions far away, turned to solid rock, and then got exposed by erosion, yet remained standing for a new species (us) to look at all these years later, is pretty amazing.
The only thing cooler than that is the view from the top of the trail around the cinder cone of Capulin Volcano National Monument in New Mexico. That might be the greatest view on Earth. (Although I saw one in an episode of ‘Doctor Who’ that might rival it. I think it is in Morocco.) On a clear day you can see 100 miles in all directions with the only evidence of human habitation being one lonely two-lane highway. The thing that struck me was the complete silence up there. The only noise is made by the wind blowing through the short needles on a few shrubs near the trail. You realize how rare true silence is in our modern world. Right now, if I shut off CNBC, I can still hear the grass being cut across the street at Clearwood Jr. High. School will start in a couple of weeks. At least I will be able to see my taxes at work from my unused bedrooms. I’m glad that the previous owner put insulated glass in this place because I-12 can be quite noisy when the wind blows from the South. Yet, in winter I can’t hear it, from only 1,000 feet away. Noise is strange.
My Western park ranking is :Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, Grand Canyon. The Canadian ones are like Rocky Mountain, but with more exposed bare rock. Winter up there in Canada is LONG and COLD. It still amazes me how many people in the East have never visited the Western National Parks. Better get out there before peak oil strikes. You have less than 10 years left.
@ Bill, near, outside of, or in Slidell:
Interesting story!
Regarding your comment: “Right now, if I shut off CNBC, I can . . .”
Seriously, dude, you really should shut off CNBC; it’s just noise (and tons of it!!!), coupled with some sensationalism, government propaganda, and mis-information about the US economy.
Speaking of CNBC and their ridiculous “talking heads” who have zero knowledge of how an economy works, watch this short clip, where a “talking head” starts arguing “economics” with a politician who actually has a degree in economics!
Go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mtQyEd-zS4&feature=player_embedded
Hilarious!
@Obewon: nice one! But of course a degree in economics does not lead inexorably to a grasp of the real economy!
@ philcu:
Your point is well taken! For example, in the US, all universities have been teaching Keynesian economics for the past 50 years, and haven’t even bothered to mention Austrian economics.
So as a result, most everyone in the US is a Keynesian, yet Keynesian economics & Keynesian models have never been proven; additionally, it has been seriously discredited over the past few years. Using mathematics and complex, unproven math models to centrally plan an economy is a really stupid idea (… and math was one of my undergraduate degrees).
Here’s a few links on the failure of Keynesian economics:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-turning-point
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/7/incorrigible-keynesians/#
Bill Bonner was right when he stated recently that “Economics is really a junk science.”