Calgary! (Part 1)

(Sunday naps always make me groggy so, hopefully this is still understandable.)

My Fall Break (hurray for going to UVU!) was last Thursday and Friday (plus the weekend). On Wednesdays, I only have two classes but they're super spread out-- one is at 1 in the afternoon and the other doesn't start until 5. My 5:00 class is only once a week and my professor is super strict (in theory) about missing it so I don't. My 1:00 class is three times a week and so far, I hadn't missed it at all. (Most people in the class miss it 1 - 2 times per week.) My 5:00 class had been cancelled for the week and since I hadn't missed my 1:00 class ever, I made arrangements ahead of time to miss it this once allowing us to leave after classes on Tuesday.

Tuesday night we drove up to Rexburg and stayed with my little sister and her husband. (I almost blogged Tuesday night about how my sister is super-darling and I want to be just like her even though she's younger and she should want to be like me.) My sister had all of her cute fall decorations up including her really pretty fall leaves quilt that she'd made and now I want one. Keep in mind that this is the sister that gave us the idea of going to Calgary in the first place. After staying up probably too late talking to them (we always do), we went to bed.

The next morning we woke up really early (Read: an hour later than we wanted to), hurried and got ready, and took off. The drive is actually super pretty. I had no idea Montana is so pretty. It seriously is. Especially with the leaves changing colors. I loved it. We played "Guess What Animal I'm Thinking Of" for probably a solid two hours. ("Okay so, you know that it's a mammal, it's pink, it has four legs, and it has a curly tail, a snout, and hooves..." "I still don't know what it is...") We'd planned on going to the Cardston, Alberta Temple on our way up so, in order to do that we had take a little detour. Said detour looked like this:

That obviously slowed us down a bit. Then, in one of the tiny towns we stopped to go to the bathroom and ended up getting back on the highway going south instead of north. Whoops. In our defense, it was a different highway so, it didn't look the same as what we'd just passed through. Twenty minutes later we figured it out and had to go back resulting in approximately forty minutes of lost time. Nice.

We finally got to Cardston at about 7:00. It's a tiny, tiny town. Really. It's like... maybe a grid of five streets each way off of Center and Main. It makes the temple decently easy to find though! They do sessions every hour on the half hour so our next chance was the 7:30 session-- but we hadn't eaten dinner and I knew there was no way Mitch would last that long. We were able to find a Subway in Cardston-- he ordered for both of us while I changed into church clothes and then I paid for it and went to the car and wolfed my sandwich down so that I could drive back to the temple while he ate/put on his shoes. And somehow, we made it.

We'd debated a little bit about doing a session at all because we were still two to three hours from Calgary but, I'm so glad that we decided to do it. The temple is beautiful inside and everyone there was so friendly and helpful. They loved that we'd come all the way from Salt Lake.

After the temple, we stopped to get gas. There was like one gas station in all of Cardston and it was 10 94. Wait... $10.94 per gallon?! And then we figured out it was $1.094 per liter. Canadians... And they drive in kilometers. That was interesting to get used to. And their speed limits are always lower than you'd expect. Like on a road you'd think would be 45 mph, it'd be like 50 kilometers per hour (~ 30 mph). At least they still drive on the right side of the road.

Anyway. Like I said, Cardston to Calgary is a little ways. We made it there (after a couple hours of "Guess Who I'm Thinking Of") at around 12:30 or so but, for some reason streets in Calgary are... complicated (more about that later) and so we didn't find our hotel until about 1:15-ish. And needless to say, after staying up maybe to late with Tracy and Freddy, a long drive, a temple session, and more drive, we were exhausted.