We escaped the jaws of the moose and headed straight to Calgary, or Cowtown. It was another car day, but also another striking one.
Crossing into Alberta we grabbed lunch at the Medicine Hat Brewing Company and had maybe the best Caesar salad of our lives: capers, egg, anchovy, bacon, oh yeah, and romaine.
Back in the car, we watching the farmland slowly turn to legitimate prairie land. I couldn’t help but torture the car with a number of seemingly appropriate film scores: Dances with Wolves, Legends of the Fall, White Fang, Iron Will, A River Runs Through It...
We were in prime Costner territory and it was beautiful.
Missing the famous Calgary Stampede by a couple weeks, we didn’t have much planned for our quick stopover.
Dinner...about summed it up.
We found our high-rise AirBnb condo to be, incredibly, just a block or two from the Vintage Chophouse and Tavern, claiming to have the best steaks in town.
After parking the car in the purgatory-like bowels of a typical Canadian parking garage abyss, we unpacked on the 17th floor and enjoyed our terrace in the middle of the city before heading out to eat.
Calgary is an interesting place.
With about 1.4 million people, it’s the largest city of the three prairie provinces and, as such, touted as cosmopolitan.
I suppose it is, comparatively, but it’s also very much the wild, wild west and we witnessed a number of criminal and unhinged activities, both from the sky above and on the ground.
First, on the walk to dinner, a guy was chased, then hit by a car...all within a single headturn from the sidewalk. Without hesitation, the seemingly unharmed guy pulled an 18" steel pipe from his backpack, chased back, and attacked said car’s windshield and side-view-mirrors like Rikki Tikki Tavi on cocaine.
Later, from the terrace, a stretch limo cruising up and down the streets below with boisterous participants hanging out the sunroof by their fingertips, sliding across the rooftop in drunken-bachelorette-Tom-Cruise style...undergarments being thrown at homeless people waiting for the bottle recycle place to open at sunrise...
Later yet, and again from the safety of the terrace, another guy zooming down the sidewalk at no less than 40 mph, falls off one of those stupid public scooters and skids across the pavement. His buddy does not yet notice. Guy lands in the middle of the exit for a weed shop, thus blocking the way in and out for not-yet-mellow customers. Friend returns on his own scooter and pulls guy aboard as if riding a horse and scooping up his partner to escape the evil-doers.
This was one night in Calgary.
And yet, we walked to the restaurant, unscathed by Cowtown crazies.
The restaurant was dark and elegant, a striking difference from the outside world.
We climbed into our booth and went straight for the martinis before indulging in one of the, if not the best, meal: tenderloin, striploin, pork chop, smoked cheddar scalloped potatoes, charred broccolini, crispy Brussels sprouts, and twice fried fingerlings.
Everything melted like butter.
Calgary crazy good.
We lumbered home and fell asleep on the couches in the living room, watching Seinfeld, before officially retiring for the evening.
I caught a second wind and ended up hanging on the terrace for a long while, getting in some great Rear Window gazing and taking in the city whilst everyone else slept.
We awoke, “feeling very Olympic,” as the 1988 Calgary ski jump towers escorted us out of town, leading the way to Banff National Park; our home for the next couple days.
Oh yes, Steven scraped a Cowtown-curb while trying to parallel park! These yahoos tried to tell me it didn’t count if you’re in the act of parking, but no way!
A curb’s a curb, baby.
6-0-0-0
Comments