Fantasy Caravan Day 5, Part 1, Calgary Tower, and visiting friends

On Wednesday morning, Fantasy RV Tours had arranged for buses to take us downtown to the Calgary Tower for breakfast.

School buses took us on a little tour of downtown and then let us off at the Calgary Tower.

At the Calgary Tower

Breakfast in the restaurant at the top of the tower

More of our crew at breakfast -- I think only our folks were there at the Calgary Tower Restaurant for breakfast.

Views of Calgary out the windows:

The Stampede grounds are out there near where the saddle-shaped building is (which happens to *not* be part of the Stampede!).

We also had tickets to go to the top level of the tower (one floor up) to the Observation level. When we got there, we found that the Calgary Visitor's Bureau was giving away hats and doing the Honorary Calgarian ceremony for folks visiting the Calgary Tower that morning -- so even though we had become Honorary Calgarians the day before, we had not all gotten hats as the fellow was charging us for them. We thought for a moment about whether we really wanted white cowboy hats to have inside the rig, and decided that we did... so we got hats, and did the ceremony again.

The lady doing the swearing in

Our group getting sworn in

If you want to see the ceremony and hear what we swore ourselves to, you can see a video here: https://youtu.be/tNyAVZJw5co

Inside the tower with our new cowboy hats. They will never be quite this clean again!

The Fantasy representative in Calgary said he had never seen them giving away hats and doing the Honorary Calgarian ceremony at Calgary tower before!

When we left the Calgary Tower, we were heading toward the train station to catch the train back to McMahon Stadium where we're parked -- but we saw police and horses and wagons, seemingly preparing for something...

... sure enough, they soon moved out in a mini-parade!

A few horses and...

... a number of wagons.

If you'd like to see a video of the mini-parade, you can see it here: https://youtu.be/cn8EyI0yzjI

At the end of the parade was the "Broom Bear" to sweep up (vacuum up?) any droppings.

We headed on over to the train station. Fantasy had given us train tickets and instructions on how to "validate" them when we were using them (the validation machine stamped a date/time stamp and the ticket was valid to use for 90 minutes after that). There are no turnstiles or gates to access the trains.

Our validated tickets.

Train coming into station

On the train

The Banff Trail station where we got off

There is a pedestrian bridge to cross the busy Crowchild Trail so we could return to McMahon Stadium.

Crossing Crowchild and the parking where our RVs are located

Red arrow points to Gracie

Crossing the pedestrian bridge

On Wednesday afternoon, we had arranged to meet up with two couples that Carl and Sue served with in Venezuela.

What a blessing to visit and fellowship with Karen and Doug, Barb and Barry.

The evening would include going to the Calgary Stampede for the evening Grandstand Show -- more on that in another post!