The Honeymoon Adventure - Day Two - Calgary Zoo Five

Today I bring you to the final area of the Calgary Zoo: Eurasia. As you can imagine this areas has creatures which one would find in the area of Eurasia, and let me say, there is no shortage of cool creatures there that I would likely never see if not available to witness in a place like this.

I've seen all sorts of cartoons of camels, and probably seen a couple in movies as well, but actually witnessing one for real is something entirely different.

I'm not a big fan of lizards, but I have heard of Komodo Dragons before thanks to The Kratt Brothers and Zaboomafoo. They really are as big as seen on TV.

Now I know Carley really liked THE WHOLE ZOO, but this may have been her second favourite part right here:

That's right. Real. Live. Pandas. Now she wasn't quite in awe as she was earlier with the Giraffes, but she was still pretty much pressed up against the glass to see them. And I will admit, they are kinda cute; I don't normally think bears are all that cute, but Pandas seem to be an exception for me. Also, I wasn't able to get a good picture of it, but they have much bigger teeth than I would have ever imagined.

Now the trail we were on which led inside to see the Pandas then went outside and into The Panda Market. I cannot describe to you the number of things inside that place that are ALL panda themed. Seriously... everything. Carley got an awesome hat inside which... is.... somewhere around the house right now. You'll see what I'm talking about in some following pictures.

Back outside we go to see the rest of the creatures. Turns out some cats LIKE to climb trees.

Now I've said before that other areas were my favourite and as I think about it more and more, I realize that I have favourite things in every area. In the Canadian Wilds, it was the wolves. In Destination Africa it was the Lemurs. In the Dorothy Harvie Gardens, it was the amazing butterflies. Here in Eurasia it is without a doubt the Red Pandas. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Red Panda before I saw them on this trip... isn't that crazy? Here's a look at how adorably cute they are!

It may be difficult to see in this picture, but they have their own treehouse to hang out in.

Isn't that so cute? It's like... I don't know... a dog / cat / raccoon thing.

These were nearby the Red Pandas. I don't remember what they're called... but isn't Carley's Panda hat real cute like all the pandas we've seen? I MEAN TOUGH.

Finally at the end of the Eurasia trail there was a Tiger.

And that covers everything there was to see at the Zoo. What a lovely place it was to visit. I'm really looking forward to the trip we have coming up in July 2019 when we're going to Winnipeg (there's a zoo there too I hear). I will absolutely be taking tons of pictures and telling you all about that as well once we go on that trip.

(I plan to be a little bit quicker with telling the story of our adventure next time though.)


~ Kyle Welykholowa

Back to Honeymoon Adventure

The Honeymoon Adventure - Day Two - Calgary Zoo

After our long six and a half eight hour journey to Calgary thanks to driving back home and then stopping in Medicine Hat for a bit, we managed to finally get to the Days Inn hotel in Northwest Calgary. The staff were super helpful during our visit including taking our payment in such a way that our yet-to-be deposited cheques weren't an issue. We unpacked, hung around the hotel for a little bit, then decided to explore our first location of Calgary, Alberta... which happened to be an outing for food at Moose McGuire's; seeing as we hadn't really had much for food since we left home. Following this adventure was pretty much back to the hotel and off to sleep with some television to keep us company for the night.

Day 2

The next morning was a highly anticipated day for us; the day of the Calgary Zoo. After having a lovely breakfast at the hotel of a couple muffins for myself, we left bright and early for a long drive through an unknown city. As it turns out, even though getting from point A to point B takes a while, if you leave super early in the morning and arrive at your destination before nearly anybody else... the traffic is quite similar to driving around here in Moose Jaw during the day... (non-existent). We did get there and find a super parking spot right by the entrance super early in the morning and despite the dreary and rainy weather, we excitedly paid and entered the complex with gusto hoping to goodness that we would be able to see everything there would be to offer.

We made it into the Calgary Zoo!

The first thing we saw was a special exhibit they have right nearby the North Entrance which is a penguin habitat. I tried not to take pictures of everything I saw everywhere I went; if you want an idea of what it was like in there, imagine going outside in the cold of winter only to see a gathering of penguins outside your home as if you're in the middle of a Happy Feet movie... only without any singing. We even managed to witness one of the handlers removing a penguin from the area (for some reason we weren't aware of). As it turns out, these penguins are about half the size of a person and even though it looks painful to be a person getting wapped and nipped by one... the handler didn't seem to mind. I should mention that we were warned not to stick anything out over the glass because they WOULD take our things if they got the chance to do so.

From this point we started our adventure into the "Canadian Wilds" where we were about to see many animals which are out and about within our fantastic homeland if you're brave enough to go find them. I won't go into detail about each and every thing we saw out there, but I did see a lot of really cool creatures, some of which would be beautiful to see in their natural habitat, and some of which I think could be absolutely terrifying to see. Now it's hard to remember exactly what everything was, but I'll do my best to caption each picture correctly and try to tell something interesting along the way.

This I think was a young caribou?

Now I couldn't get any awesome pictures of the wolves, but here are a couple anyways.

 

Unfortunately a pack of wolves just don't really stand still very much which makes it a little bit difficult to take a good picture of them.

Something super fun that happened to us while we were near the wolves was a sudden attack of pinecones from a nearby tree. As it turns out... there was a little guy climbing around up there knocking them off for some reason and I was lucky enough to get it on video.

Here's one of the squirrels in action; I've never seen this happen before.

This picture is a little bit low-quality; apparently it's difficult to get a picture of a squirrel sitting still.

There's so much to tell about our visit to the Calgary Zoo, that I think I'll have to stop here for now and continue on again next time with another post. I'm super excited to share this all with you and I apologize for the delay in the coming posts; it's difficult having a family and starting a new job all at the same time. :P

Have a great day everybody and wish me luck with my new job! ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa

Back to Honeymoon Adventure

The Honeymoon Adventure - Day One

Let us begin our new journey with a telling of our honeymoon adventure.

After driving home the night of the wedding and sleeping in our own comfy bed for one final time before going away on our trip, we got up nice and early and finished packing so we could head on our way to the wondrous land of Calgary, Alberta. So began our drive away from our home in a direction we had never travelled before, what a fantastic time this wou--wait... forgot my wallet... Okay! And off we go again!

So we ended up leaving a little bit later than we had previously planned because we chose to be lazy and not finish packing until the day of the trip... and I forgot my wallet which was needed for ID and whatnot SO WE COULD ACTUALLY CHECK INTO THE HOTEL. It wasn't such a big deal, we still made it with plenty of time to spare before the end of the day and I really enjoyed seeing all the new sights I hadn't seen before on the drive. Carley was wonderful and drove up until Medicine Hat where we picked up a little bit of groceries to eat at the hotel; I drove the rest of the way.

I didn't realize it at the time, but driving through Medicine Hat on the way to Calgary is actually driving through three different little cities that are right next to one another, how cool is that? I can't even begin to describe the sights on the way. Around here I'm used to seeing fields upon fields of farming space and not much else. Once we got into Alberta though... it became fields upon fields of grazing land for HUGE flocks of cows. Also there were lots of trees and hills and... ugh... my words just don't do this justice.

If I could take good pictures and drive at the same time, that would be super helpful in this instance, BUT that's illegal and dangerous... and the pictures wouldn't turn out great anyways. So I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that the sights are much different than around Saskatchewan and if you get the chance, you should totally go on a trip to see for yourself. I should also mention how awesome the Alberta highways are compared to ours; the roads seem to be in better condition than in Saskatchewan and every few kilometers there are spots to pull over and dump your garbage, recycling, and sometimes even compost in bins on the side of the road with actual road space to pull over safely... kind of like when race car drivers go off the track into the little sidelane thinger to get their tires changed and whatnot.

The drive wasn't the only amazing thing though; as awed as I was by Medicine Hat with the two cities on either side which were all connected... the size of Calgary compared to the cities here is insane. Once we hit Calgary, it was still another half hour drive for like 25 km THROUGH THE CITY! Let me tell you, Carley didn't drive anywhere the entire time we were there because the amount of traffic and the size of the city was a little bit scary compared to what we're used to around here. I didn't mind the driving though because it was always an adventure to every place we went during our trip... but those are more stories for next time.

Stay tuned for more stories of our honeymoon adventure! ^_^


~ Kyle Welykholowa

Back to Honeymoon Adventure