Alberta and BC trip (part 1) - yyz to yyc
I've been thinking about and planning a road trip to AB and BC for such a long time, read so much material and saw so many pictures, that it seemed like I almost had already been there many times, and nothing could surprise me in this trip anymore. However, just as always about it, I was wrong :) No matter how many huge panoramas you'd see, how many reviews you'd read, and how many times you'd check out google street view and google earth, still your own personal experience of those magnificent places is always something new, and seeing it all in real life gives you a completely new twist on things, that actually makes all your 'previous' information so small and negligible and eventually completely replaces it.
We were flying out from Toronto as usual at 6am, so as usual left from home in the middle of the night. But the good thing is because of that we always arrive early to the new place. We got there around 9am. When landing in Calgary Airport, you can already see the mountains at the horizon, and the views are breathtaking!! Huge, snowy tops mountains, with sharp silhouettes, and endless all along the west side, they are everywhere as long as you can see.
Unfortunately once landed, mountains are out of sight, and so it is in the city - you have to be living further west to actually see them.
Calgary Airport is great - nice, clean and relatively small. And the best thing for us - travelling inside Canada doesn't take us through customs. Woohoo! That's why we got free almost immediately. First thing I saw
in the airport - fresh juice stand! Yess! I immediately ordered orange+beets+carrot+apple juice, and....the service was pretty bad. No only I had to wait for about 10min with only 1 customer ahead of me, they also confused my order. Well, I have to say every time I leave from Toronto it always seems like I get bad service everywhere, however it might just be that Toronto's perfect and quick service has spoiled me. So the bottom line is that I got great juice right in the airport as soon as we arrived there, and that was great :)
Our next destination was Calgary downtown, where we were planning to visit a vegan restaurant. Drive from the airport to the city was actually stunning in a way that there was practically no development there. Everything is still in progress, so technically you drive through the fields all the way from airport to Calgary's suburbs. Honestly, I didn't do enough research about Calgary, and after so much talking about its skyrocketing economic development, I expected to see a large industrial city like Toronto. However....Calgary is far from being a large city, it is barely average sized and very new. Again, compared to other big cities. The downtown was nice but very small with just a bunch of skyscrapers.
However once we started walking around, we figured people are quite friendly, and there are some neat things such as steps over the floor grids to cross over etc. Also, we've spotted a very nice long street where all the bars and restaurants were located - 17th Ave SW! That's the place to go. And that's where The Coup is located - our experience in this veg place was simply great! The service was awesome, the design was neat, the food was yum! What else is there to wish? Oh and prices were decent too. So it's a really nice place, would definitely recommend to anyone.
After that, our plan was to go west, west and further west! So we started to drive towards the gorgeous huge misty Rocky Mountains, via Canmore, planning to stay in Banff.
The whole general plan was to see Banff, Jasper, drive through the parks, then head towards Vancouver, ferry to Vancouver Island, driver around there, and then possibly cross over to Seattle and come back to Calgary via Washington, Wyoming and Montana. Alas, the distances were slightly underestimated:) And we ended up doing only the Canadian side, but omg did we see lots and lots of most beautiful nature and absolutely amazing animals! So no regrets. I can now totally say that Western Canada absolutely deserves its whole separate road trip. And many other separate trips. To be continued.. :)
Here's our classic route for the first couple days:
The vegan chili we ordered at The Coup - delicious!
Part 1 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/1686.html
Part 2 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/4254.html
Part 3 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/5472.html
Part 4 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/9022.html
Part 5 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/10052.html
Part 6 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/19373.html
Part 7 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/22438.html
Part 8 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/31352.html
We were flying out from Toronto as usual at 6am, so as usual left from home in the middle of the night. But the good thing is because of that we always arrive early to the new place. We got there around 9am. When landing in Calgary Airport, you can already see the mountains at the horizon, and the views are breathtaking!! Huge, snowy tops mountains, with sharp silhouettes, and endless all along the west side, they are everywhere as long as you can see.
Unfortunately once landed, mountains are out of sight, and so it is in the city - you have to be living further west to actually see them.
Calgary Airport is great - nice, clean and relatively small. And the best thing for us - travelling inside Canada doesn't take us through customs. Woohoo! That's why we got free almost immediately. First thing I saw
in the airport - fresh juice stand! Yess! I immediately ordered orange+beets+carrot+apple juice, and....the service was pretty bad. No only I had to wait for about 10min with only 1 customer ahead of me, they also confused my order. Well, I have to say every time I leave from Toronto it always seems like I get bad service everywhere, however it might just be that Toronto's perfect and quick service has spoiled me. So the bottom line is that I got great juice right in the airport as soon as we arrived there, and that was great :)
Our next destination was Calgary downtown, where we were planning to visit a vegan restaurant. Drive from the airport to the city was actually stunning in a way that there was practically no development there. Everything is still in progress, so technically you drive through the fields all the way from airport to Calgary's suburbs. Honestly, I didn't do enough research about Calgary, and after so much talking about its skyrocketing economic development, I expected to see a large industrial city like Toronto. However....Calgary is far from being a large city, it is barely average sized and very new. Again, compared to other big cities. The downtown was nice but very small with just a bunch of skyscrapers.
However once we started walking around, we figured people are quite friendly, and there are some neat things such as steps over the floor grids to cross over etc. Also, we've spotted a very nice long street where all the bars and restaurants were located - 17th Ave SW! That's the place to go. And that's where The Coup is located - our experience in this veg place was simply great! The service was awesome, the design was neat, the food was yum! What else is there to wish? Oh and prices were decent too. So it's a really nice place, would definitely recommend to anyone.
After that, our plan was to go west, west and further west! So we started to drive towards the gorgeous huge misty Rocky Mountains, via Canmore, planning to stay in Banff.
The whole general plan was to see Banff, Jasper, drive through the parks, then head towards Vancouver, ferry to Vancouver Island, driver around there, and then possibly cross over to Seattle and come back to Calgary via Washington, Wyoming and Montana. Alas, the distances were slightly underestimated:) And we ended up doing only the Canadian side, but omg did we see lots and lots of most beautiful nature and absolutely amazing animals! So no regrets. I can now totally say that Western Canada absolutely deserves its whole separate road trip. And many other separate trips. To be continued.. :)
Here's our classic route for the first couple days:
The vegan chili we ordered at The Coup - delicious!
Part 1 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/1686.html
Part 2 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/4254.html
Part 3 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/5472.html
Part 4 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/9022.html
Part 5 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/10052.html
Part 6 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/19373.html
Part 7 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/22438.html
Part 8 http://vegantravels.livejournal.com/31352.html