Today was the day we had to hand the RV back at Calgary which is about a 2 hour drive from Banff.
As I mentioned before the Banff campsite was the least attractive of all of the campsites (resembled a car park
)
but this morning, to our delight, we woke up with Elk as our neighbours!
We decided to leave the campsite early (7.30 am) but still had to queue to deal with the waste , the least pleasant part of having an RV!
We were soon on the road to Calgary and the journey was nice and simple. We located the Cruise Canada HQ and parked it up , unloaded our gear and called a taxi to down town Calgary.
We were soon at our hotel, the Calgary Ramada which classes itself as a family hotel, about 2 hours ahead of our check in time.
Our intention was to leave the luggage and explore but the nice lady at reception gave us an early check in, I told her I was impressed with her customer service and she said she was impressed with my Cath Kidson Disney Bag and had worked in a hotel at WDW for a while.
Once in the room we spotted the pool and the kids decided they wanted a dip, we were the only ones in there!
After the swim we went for a wander and had a Tim Hortons which was a completely confusing experience as the menu made very little sense! We were all actually pretty whacked from the early start so we had a wonder around Down Town. We felt that Calgary has a very different atmosphere to Vancouver, it is much more of a business scene in down town. There are a huge number of interlinked malls that house businesses, homes, retail and leisure facilities.
The kids played in an indoor playground for a while.
After that, and a bit of retail therapy, we headed back to the hotel with a view to seeing if we could get some food there and an early night.
This is where things were a bit difficult, Calgary has different licencing laws to Vancouver and under 18s cannot go into a restaurant which has a gaming machine, the restaurant attached to our family hotel has a gaming machine so eating there is simply not an option
.
We therefore headed back out and found somewhere that could accommodate children and had dinner and then went back to the hotel for some sleep ahead of our long journey home.