Day 4 - Driving on the right... left... right... watch out!!!

I feel like today threw just about everything it could at us... but we came through it okay.

I'd booked the rental vehicle through Wheelsabroad.com in February of this year. I'd deliberately booked the pick-up point at "1720 Bow Trail SW, Calgary", because it was about 10 minutes walk from our hotel. Upon arriving at or near to 1720 Bow Trail (hard to tell, nothing is as easy as Google Maps makes it look), we couldn't see anything but a Chrysler dealership. We went inside and asked the girl at the reception desk if she knew where 1720 Bow Trail was. She scowled a little at the print off I'd carried with me in our "Canadian Fun" folder, and said she didn't. She called her boss over, who informed her that 1720 Bow Trail was the address of the building in which we were standing. Having chortled a little at that, he examined our rental booking and saw that the wheelsabroad.com website had pointed us to National Car Rental... who no longer operated out of that address. He pointed us further down the building to their in-house car rental, which was run by Enterprise Car Rental.

They had never heard of us.

By now it had started to rain outside.

The helpful chap at the rental desk (Chris) spent a goodly time trying to track down our rental vehicle, but was defeated, mainly because it wasn't booked through his company. In the end he gave us the address of the National Car Rental office in Calgary, and called us a cab.

I wasn't expecting NCR to have heard of us when we got there, and I wasn't disappointed. The chap at the desk, though helpful, spent so long with a furrowed brow that I was starting to become convinced that here was our first smeg up of the holiday.

But then, a breakthrough. He took the printed off instructions I was carrying through to some guy in the back, who managed to track down our booking. Thankfully! Overjoyed, I asked if we could rent a sat nav system (yeah, I know I bought one before we came away, but I cunningly left it at home -scowls-). They told us to go and wander around for an hour, and they'd sort everything out for us.

So we wandered around to the EPCOR centre for performing arts, which is a retail outlet for TicketMaster, and picked up our tickets for the Stampede on Friday. It was raining quite hard now, just like being in England unfortunately. We slowly made our way back to the car rental place, stopping only to buy some extra strong bug spray (we've both been bitten a little), by which time the car, the sat nav, and everything was ready.

We must have sat in the car for 15 minutes getting used to it. It's huge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Edge

I couldn't even work out how to go from Park to Drive. But eventually... we made our way off the carpark, and onto 10th Avenue, SW Calgary.

The sat nav proved its worth straight away, helping us navigate out of the city, and getting onto the road to Vulcan. I was surprised how quickly I got used to driving on the wrong side of the road. Granted, once out of the city and onto Highway 2 south, there was little traffic. A few turns later we were onto this road that stretched for as far as the eye could see, with nothing but flat fields surrounding us (the sat nav gleefully announced, "continue for 26 miles")... my gosh this province is flat in places.

We made it to Vulcan. It was still raining. I spotted the space ship as we were pulling up to park. Sandra's reaction was less than enthusiastic, but I wasn't bothered. I've been wanting to see that space ship for at least a year, and to see it for real had me cackling hard. We spent a good while in Vulcan, then eventually drove out through miles and miles of nothing to the Okotoks "erratics" rocks, huge deposits from the Rockies, dragged there by glaciers lots and lots of years ago.

Then we finally drove back to Calgary. It was a complex journey back, involving U-turns and diversions as I tried to figure out the vagaries of the sat nav. Not helped by one of the major routes being blocked by an accident.

I congratulated myself on a job (or jobs) well done when we finally got back to the hotel. Considered we'd had a difficult day, and won through. Felt very pleased with myself. Then checked the Canada News www and found out the reason for one of the problems on the way back to the hotel:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2008/07/02/deerfoot-rollover.html

Kind of puts everything into perspective, really.