After a good breakfast courtesy of the Hostel staff, we hit the town walking.
Compared to September (when Kate and I were here last), there are far less tourists – too cold for camping but not enough snow for skiing. What a shame – Banff is as beautiful as ever at this time of year.
We visited the Banff Springs Hotel, but did not check-in.
After our little unguided walking tour, we returned to the car, waved goodbye to the mountains, and drove East to Calgary. However, it was not smooth sailing. Shifting between gears was rough and the engine was revving high down the highway – symptoms of a transmission problem. Not good.
Upon arrival to Calgary, we visited Ben, a friendly neighbourhood mechanic, who performed a preliminary assessment on our car.
“Torque converter clutch circuit intermittent”??? That can’t be good… According to Ben, it’s a serious issue and needs to be dealt with by specialists. Therefore, we booked an appointment at National Transmission for tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, we drove downtown to return our super sleeping bags to MEC and to buy me a new traveler’s backpack for my upcoming adventures (stay tuned).
All of this shopping made us hungry, so we ate subs in front of the train tracks.
For most of the afternoon, we just enjoyed being downtown, walking down Stephen Avenue, going into shops and staring up at the Calgary Tower.
We ate dinner at Tim Horton’s and made complete fools of ourselves by laughing too hard.
AirBnB pulled through for us again. We were lucky to find a beautiful condo in downtown Calgary to stay in for the night. Here’s the view of the Saddledome from the balcony:
(the Flames lost that night, FYI)
Our host, Femi, was very friendly and joined us to watch a movie, “The Bucket List”. Unfortunately, we all fell asleep about half-way through the movie and didn’t wake up until the credits. We tried.
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