Trip to Banff: Day 1

[This is written after my trip, from my notes and memory.]

My trip to Banff to present a paper at the Combinatorial Game Theory Workshop started off well: when I arrived at the airport I found I had been promoted to executive class!

I wasn't that impressed with executive class. Sure, the seats were larger and more comfortable, but then I'm not a large person and don't need a large seat. There is no space for storing items beneath the seat in front of you, so you have to get up often to the overhead bins to exchange books and papers and the like.

The glass cups for beverages did feel nice. But lunch was poor. (This is with Air Canada.) Lunch included a bad rice dish (couldn't finish), some tasteless (supposedly gouda) cheese and crackers, a salad, some grilled chicken strips, and an oily roasted red pepper. I wouldn't have minded passing on the whole thing; in fact, regular class normally doesn't get lunch on this 2.5 hour flight. However, regular class did get lunch this time of some pre-made sandwiches due to some complicated food-service strike reasons. (I think the people that load snacks were striking so the airline needed to get some sort of food and ended up buying everyone sandwiches.) Those sandwiches probably were better than my executive lunch!

So in the end I don't see a convincing reason to ever fly executive class after this experience. There are no additional benefits I really appreciate. (On the other hand, I did have access to the executive class lounge in the airport. However, I went through security before realizing the lounge was before security and was too lazy to go out again, so I didn't get to experience it.)

When I landed, I had to go through customs. This was a little fun, since I brought a ziplock bag of blueberries on my trip and hadn't managed to finish them on the plane. So I declared them, went through the importing fruits-and-vegetables line, made the official have to track down the rules for importing blueberries from California, and he decided that I couldn't import them. Then, after I decided to stand there and attempted to finish them (and offered some to the official, who said he had to decline), he looked at the size of the ziplock and just made me promise to eat them all and not throw any away, and sent me on my way. heh.

I picked up my rental car -a nice green Chevy Optra with an amazing turning radius- and headed west toward Banff. It was raining very hard. As I drove, I noticed:
* Outside of Calgary everything is very green. Green fields and lots of evergreens in forests. The landscape is not rolling hills but would better be described as plains, sometimes angled.
* The plains have occasional cows. This was much nicer than the packed herds of cows one can see off of I-5 in California that stand densely in a dirt field (because they'd eaten all the grass).
* Calgary itself has an adult store in every other strip mall, surprisingly well advertised. (Do they need them more during the winter? Is Canada just more accepting of these types of stores?)
* Funny signs: (1) KFC sells baby back ribs. (2) A highway interchange with a sign a few hundred feet before it: "Important Intersection Ahead"
* The mountains on the way into Banff were stunning, especially one spot in which fog was filling a valley between two mountains and the clouds had just parted to let a ray of sunlight through and strike the valley. I pulled over on the highway to take a picture. Sadly, I discovered that although I had charged my camera batteries the previous night, I had neglected to take them out of my charger and put them in camera! And the charger was buried in my luggage. So I missed with photo opportunity. *sigh*

Transcanada highway 1 was closed for flooding due to the amazingly heavy rain, so I had to detour. But this wasn't much of a problem, just another mild surprise on this day of traveling.

After arriving and checking into my room -a single, much like a hotel room, that shares a bathroom with an adjacent room-, I plugged in my laptop, booted up chowhound, and started investigating what restaurants in Banff are any good. Half an hour later, I was on my way to the restaurant in the Buffalo Mountain Lodge, a restaurant known for Albertan/Canadian cuisine (an emphasis on meat). While the lodge was easy to find, the restaurant was harder. There were no signs advertising it. It was unannounced, quietly adjoined to the lobby inside the main building. The place was truly a lodge: everything made of heavy woods, and with a fireplace. I ordered a plate with elk (like a strip steak but milder) and venison (like broiled filet mignon, but tougher). It came with a tomato relish (that was so strong it dominated everything, so I pushed it to the side and ignored it), asparagus, a single carrot, and a few potato chunks. The dinner was a nice adventure in game meat, but nothing pleased me that much and I felt it wasn't worth the money (~$32 US). I also passed on the wine after flipping through the impressive (30+ page) list -- too expensive for me, especially since I didn't see anything that I knew I'd like and would match the meats.

On the way home, at almost ten pm, I was struck by how the sun hadn't quite set yet. It didn't occur to me that this would happen (Canada being at a higher latitude), and it was actually slightly unnerving. More on that in a later blog post.