the Calgary Tower

the glass floor is a little nerve wracking

the saddledome. appropriately living up to its name

Ah, finally. The last bit of our vacation. The Calgary Tower. We really wanted to have dinner at their 360 cafe. It rotates as you dine, and I thought it would make for a unique experience. But we got there exactly one hour before it opened for dinner and quite honestly, there's really not much to do up in the tower for an entire hour. I'm just going to go ahead and say it. This is a complete cash grab. If you don't go for the restaurant, other than getting some great city pictures, that's all there is (if you're lucky to have nice clear skies -- I've been there when it's been foggy and that's not cool). So we tried extremely hard to stick it out but we just couldn't, and we thought it would make more sense to at least get back to the car before we added another hour on to our parking ticket price. It was kind of a bummer.

We also got chewed out by a cop on our way there. It was one of those weird situations where no one knew what he wanted us to do. We were at a light and waiting to go at a safe time and he put his siren on as a warning or something. And so we were like, he must want us to go. Does he want us to get out of his way? And the pedestrians were like, should we walk? Does he want to get around the corner? So we just went because we thought there was an emergency. Then he stopped us and chewed us out for going before the pedestrians (who we waited for as long as we felt we could but they just weren't walking and I think it was because of him and his siren). So after asking us over and over again what our "deal" was (how on earth do you answer that question to anyone let alone a cop?), he decided he had "more pressing matters to attend to" so he didn't give us the $500+ ticket he really seemed to want to give us. Whew.

After the tower, we headed up to Crate and Barrel. It's a lovely store, but more like an upscale IKEA than Anthropologie. They did have some really lovely pieces of furniture and just about any gadget for your kitchen you could ever imagine. (Gadgets like a tomato corer that cost so much, you could never justify the purchase because of how little you'd use it.) And while they had their furniture arranged, they hadn't done anything particularly inspiring with it, so I couldn't even get any ideas from just looking around. I'm still really glad we went, though. Mostly because I got the one thing I wanted to get from that store, and I put to rest all my thoughts about how awesome it was. Because it's not that awesome. Honestly, if we had one here, I wouldn't really care so much about it.

we both liked this sofa -- all right. they had nice stuff, but nothing I'm still thinking and dreaming about.