October 2011 Day Trips

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All photos for these trips can be found in our
October 2011 Day Trips Photo Album
Some are also shown in this blog.

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After arriving back in Calgary from our California road trip, in late September, we set about attempting to sell our condo again. We were somewhat buoyed by recent reports of a potential upswing in the Calgary condo market although our building had been plagued by a recent spate of low sales prices due primarily to older folks moving out to assisted living and the related families selling, at what most folks here believed to be, well below market value. We, however, decided to stick to our guns and put our place on the market near the value we were looking for. So onto the market it went...

In the meantime we decided to embark on a couple of day trips out of Calgary to places we had never been to before.

The first day trip was to the Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage site located about 160 kms south of Calgary. Easy drive south on Highway 2. We stopped for a very nice "home cooked" lunch in Nanton and visited the Ultimate Trains model railroad store while in Nanton, a neat and fun place for model railroad enthusiasts. Leaving Nanton we soon arrived at the buffalo jump interpretive centre. The view across the prairie from the interpretive centre is pretty cool... the horizon is dotted with wind turbines (might have to click on the picture to enlarge it so see the wind turbines a bit better)...

The interpretive centre is extremely well done. There is a short film showing how the buffalo jump was engineered and there is a walkway out to where the original jump site was thousands of years ago. It is somewhat overgrown now so the jump does not look that impressive but you have to imagine what it was like back then...

... as they mention in the museum, archaeologists have dug down some 30 meters or more and found evidence of the jumps being carried out thousands of years ago.

The museum is pretty cool with numerous displays depicting the jump and how the people lived those so many years ago.

The second day trip was a Polar Bear Safari to Churchill Manitoba...

This was a long day, leaving Calgary at 6:15AM and returning to Calgary at about 8:15PM, but absolutely worth it. We saw about a dozen polar bears, a couple of Arctic White Foxes, an Arctic Hare, an Arctic Silver Fox, a flock of Ptarmigans and numerous other flocks of bird species along with fabulous scenery along the shores of Hudson's Bay.

One of many polar bears...

A white and a silver Arctic Fox...

An Arctic Hare...

... and a flock of Ptarmigans...

Unfortunately for the hare and ptarmigan, all of whom have turned white for the winter, nobody told them that there is no snow on the ground yet. They sat extremely still seeming to be thinking "... if I don't move they won't see me..." but to no avail ...as you can see, they are clearly visible in the willows...

A couple of excellent day trips from Calgary. To top off the month of October, we now have a pending sale, at a decent price, on our condo... we'll see how that goes as we enter November...