We will arrive in Calgary on 6/19, midafternoon before starting a tour of Canadian Rockies at 6 PM the next day. Who can give suggestions for how to spend the time for 4 Yanks (retirees who prefer to not do a lot of walking). Does Grayline still do a tour? I can't find it on their website. Can you recommend other tour companies?

Yes, pollyvw, Grayline still seems to be going strong. Here's a half day tour of Calgary:

http://www.grayline.ca/tours/pages/g...CitySights.asp

Grayline's tour seems to concentrate on Canada Olympic Park and Fort Calgary. Something that would be more interesting, in my opinion, would be a day tour to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleotology in Drumheller, a town to the east of Calgary. The dinosaur skeletons are very impressive.

I don't know where you'll be staying in Calgary. If you'll be downtown, you might want to dine somewhere along Stephen Avenue Walk (8th Avenue) or alternatively in the Eau Claire Market complex near the banks of the Bow River.

A nice, if expensive, restaurant is River Cafe on Prince's Island, accessible via a footbridge from the Eau Claire Market area.

In case you feel like walking four or five blocks, I'll copy and paste my standard Stephen Avenue Walk into the next post. This is something you could do in the morning if you were going to do the Grayline tour in the afternoon.

<b>Start of Tour</b>

My recommended tour begins at Toronto Dominion Square, a high-rise building that occupies the block between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue SW and between 2nd Street and 3rd Street SW.

There is a Light Rail Transit (LRT) station at the 7th Avenue entrance to this building, so this would be the ideal place to alight from the train if you have used the LRT to access downtown.

<b>Devonian Gardens</b>

Take the escalator or the elevator to the fourth level of Toronto Dominion Square and walk through the four acre Devonian Gardens. Admission is free. You probably can imagine what these indoor gardens mean to us Calgarians when we take our sandwiches there during a lunch hour on a – 25 deg C winter day. The outdoor pool that you'll see is converted into a skating rink in winter.

<b>Plus 15 System</b>

You’ll notice that the downtown buildings are connected to each other by overhead glass tunnels. This is called the Plus 15 system (because regulations specify that the tunnels be built 15 feet above ground level). The Plus 15 system enables us to walk from one end of downtown to the other without coats and boots in winter. The value of this not readily apparent in summer, but we really do appreciate it in winter.

<b>Interesting Stores</b>

Return to ground level and walk eastwards along the 8th Avenue / Stephen Avenue Walk until you reach 1st Street SW. Here you will see a fairly elegant building, which is old by Calgary’s standards, and which houses The Bay department store.

To someone who doesn’t know its background, The Bay looks like a regular department store, but it has quite a history. Its real name is The Hudson's Bay Company, and it's the oldest corporation in the world. It received its charter from King Charles II in 1670.

It was created to manage the fur trade from North America to Europe. The canoe routes that Hudson's Bay traders learned from First Nations people, the trading posts and forts that Hudson's Bay officials created in remote outposts, and the surveys they undertook helped to open North America up for subsequent European settlers.

The distinctively coloured stripes of the logo that appears on The Bay’s shopping bags represent the characteristically striped blankets that the Hudson’s Bay Company traded in exchange for furs.

You can still buy those blankets as well as coats made from the blanket cloth. My experience, however, is that the coats tend not to be on display during the summer.

Cross to the other side of the 8th Avenue pedestrian mall from The Bay, and go into Lammle's Western Wear &amp; Tack. It's a cultural experience to see that many cowboy boots under one roof, if you've never been exposed to that sight before.

Continued in next post ......

<b>East end of 8th Avenue / Stephen Avenue Walk</b>

Keep walking eastwards along the 8th Avenue pedestrian mall. You'll cross Centre Street, and from then onwards the street names will end in SE instead of SW.

You'll arrive at an open air square called Olympic Plaza between 1st Street SE and Macleod Trail (equivalent of 2nd Street SE). This was where the medals were presented during the 1988 Winter Olympics. The shallow wading pool that you'll see in summer is converted to an ice rink in winter. Bands sometimes perform there for free during summer lunch hours, and office workers take their sandwiches and listen.

At the west end of Olympic Plaza is a group of statues of The Famous Five. They were Alberta women (Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby and Nellie McClung) who in 1929 persuaded the Imperial Privy Council to include women in the definition of &quot;persons&quot; in the British North America Act (which served effectively as Canada's Constitution).

Across Macleod Trail, opposite Olympic Plaza is the older, sandstone City Hall and next to it the newer, mirrored glass Municipal Building.

Macleod Trail is named after Colonel James Macleod of the North West Mounted Police who ordered a fort to be built at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers in 1875. Macleod named the place Fort Calgary after an area near his sister's home in Scotland.

<b>Rainy day alternative</b>

You can still walk from the Devonian Gardens to the Bay through the Plus 15 System.

Another thing you might want to do is visit the Glenbow Museum, on Stephen Avenue Walk.

Postscript.

Pollyvw, I've just thought of something. You said your Canadian Rockies tour would start at 6 pm. In that case I wonder if my suggestion of the Royal Tyrrell Museum isn't cutting things a bit fine.

Calgary to Drumheller is 88 miles and takes about 1 hr 50 minutes to drive. Say 2 hours to be conservative.

If you were driving yourselves, you'd probably need to leave your hotel at about 8 or 8.30 am to walk a few blocks to a rental car company's offices and take delivery of a car.

You'd need to set out from Calgary by 9 am.

You could look through the museum from 11 am to 1 pm.

Have lunch from 1 pm to 2 pm.

Drive back to Calgary, arriving around 4 pm.

This would give you time to drop off the rental car, pick up your luggage if you had left it in the safe keeping of your hotel, and meet your tour.

I don't know if a commercial tour could be guaranteed to get you back in time.

Another place you could consider spending the day is <b>Heritage Park</b>, which is a pioneer village in a southwestern suburb of Calgary. You can ride the steam train around the pioneer village, ride the paddle wheeler on the lake, and look inside some of the houses, the blacksmith's workshop, etc., all of which predate 1914. (That is what passes for old in Calgary!) Then you could have lunch at the Wainwright Hotel. You could do all this at a very leisurely pace and still get back downtown in plenty of time for your tour.

To get to Heritage Park you could take the LRT (commuter train) south towards Somerset, and disembark at Heritage Station. At Heritage Station you could transfer (at not extra charge) to Bus No. 502 which would take you to Heritage Park.

You also could get there by cab. A cab ride would cost 10 CAD - 15 CAD and, shared amongst 4 of you, would hardly cost more than 4 train fares.

By the way, use of the train is <b>free</b> in the downtown core. This could be useful if you followed the walking itinerary I provided in previous posts. You could walk in one direction and take the train back in the other direction.