Loonie, Toonie

Day 27, Tuesday, July 9

Today was the best weather day yet, at a pleasant 25^o.  It was our last day at Stampede Park, and we took in another rodeo, a dog show and the Stampede Marketplace.  An overall great day!

The Calgary Stampede is very much a part of the Canadian culture, and quite different from anything we’ve seen.  It’s been interesting to observe other cultural differences. I’ve already talked about the temps, and kilometers vs miles, but we’ve observed several other differences: 

First is the money.  It took us awhile to figure out that the one dollar coin is called a loonie, and the two dollar coin is a toonie (or maybe it’s a two-nee, who knows?) 

By the way…One of the guys in our group used to work for the Canadian money printing company, and said it is now printed overseas!  Canada is working to eliminate the penny, so, since February of this year, your total purchase is rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents…a pretty good way to eliminate pennies. But with the 1 and 2 dollar coins provided as change, we find we’re accumulating a lot of heavy jingling coins in our pouch.

The second thing we are figuring out, is that even though there is a favorable exchange rate, things are a lot more expensive here.  For example, a case of beer is $38 CAN!  A bottle of vodka that costs $30 in the US is $60 CAN.  At a bar,it is cheaper to buy a mixed drink than a beer. Oh, and a mixed drink is called a high-ball.  (All of these are important items to know if you’re traveling to Canada!)

We bought a case of water—we thought it was a good price at $3.49 CAN, but when we checked out, we were charged a deposit fee of $2.50 plus an environmental fee of .72.  So, our water ended up not being such a good deal after all!  Then, we decided to use our water jugs, so filled a 3 gallon jug of water with a machine that measured liters….and the kid at the cash register had to try to convert it to know how much to charge us.   

As an RV’er, it is important to know the height of your vehicle because of the various bridges and overpasses.  So…we had to convert our vehicle height to meters—better to be safe than sorry!  We put a sticker on the dashboard so there would be no mistake!

Here’s another interesting tidbit—we took a look at some of the arts and crafts that were on display at Stampede Park, where it was a competition, similar to a state fair.  It was peculiar that first place ribbons were red, and second place ribbons were blue!  (Still haven’t figured that one out. )

We had our farewell dinner with the entire group tonight at Calgary Winter Park.  We were entertained by the Rough Riders—a humorous duo that played a guitar that looked like a horse, and sang old cowboy songs that really got the group rocking!  We all said our final Ya-hoo’s and Happy Trails to the Calgary Stampede.

 

Tomorrow morning, we head to Lake Louise for a couple of days.  I’ll keep you posted on the new adventures.