A Week In My Life: Vacation With My Family Part Two

Hey guys!

It's Monday, and as promised, I'm here to share the second half of my recent vacation I took with my family with you all.

I left off with us getting ready to leave for Calgary, and so that is where I shall begin from today.

Friday:

Friday morning came pretty early, and we had a lot of packing and rearranging things ahead of us, since there was going to be six of us in one vehicle for the long drive coming up. Somehow, we made it all fit, and we were checked out of Cypress and on our way to Calgary.

We ended up meeting up with Jaazy's mom and her cousin along the way, and had a quick visit with them, and planned to meet them later that night at the hotel.

While the drive ended up being long and tedious, this day was honestly my favorite of the entire week.

My nephew and I watched Thunderbirds on the dvd player in my mom's van, and I also curled up with The Season Of You and Me by Robin Constantine for quite a bit of the drive.

Finally we were in Calgary! And we all ended up being really happy with the hotel we had picked, The Best Western Airport Inn, as the staff was super friendly, the free breakfast was delicious, and I can't stress enough how clean this hotel was. That's the biggest way to impress me honestly is with cleanliness, and this hotel definitely hit the spot on that one.

I took Jaazy for a quick tour of the hotel, while my parent's and brothers unpacked, and then we were off to The Olive Garden for dinner.

We had a fantastic meal there, and it's always a treat to come here, since we don't have one anywhere near us. Jaazy kept telling everyone how his mashed potatoes were the best potatoes he'd ever eaten before, and it was cracking all of us up.

After dinner, it was time to make good on another promise to Jaaz. He had received quite a bit of spending money as birthday gifts, and we had promised him a trip to the Cross Iron Mills mall to spend it.

He loved The Bass Pro Shop 

and then enjoyed getting to spend his money on new toys and books at The Disney Store and Indigo.

After shopping, we made our way back to the hotel, met up with his mom and her cousin, and had a quick visit before calling it a night.

Saturday:

Today was the day that Jaaz had been anticpating for quite some time! It was finally time for his first visit to Calaway Park. Now, unfortunately, this day ended up being a huge disappointment, and I'm not sure any of us would feel the urge to go back anytime soon, but we were all really glad he got the opportunity to go.

It had been at least six years since I'd last been to Calaway, but since it was the long weekend, I knew we'd want to get there early. After a quick breakfast at the hotel, we settled in for the somewhat long car trip from our hotel to Calaway.

We could tell right from the parking lot that this was going to be a very busy day at Calaway, and on top of that it was one of the hottest days so far the whole summer, and I think those two conditions contributed to our overall negative experience here.

While I know that I've come to have been spoiled on amusement parks by Disney vacations, I honestly wasn't expecting that from Calaway. However, there seemed to be some major staffing issues the day we went. While every single employee we encountered was as friendly as could be, we noticed numerous food booths not open, which I thought was a tad weird for the long weekend, and the two times we did go up to a food both, we ended up waiting over an hour each time.

Jaazy did seem to have a lot of fun this day:

The long waits for everything, and the limited amount of shade that was available, made this day not too enjoyable, and it was definitely my least favorite experience from our vacation.

While I can't say that I wouldn't recommend Calaway, as it is awesome to actually have a theme park in western Canada, I just wouldn't recommend visiting on a long weekend as it felt that they were vastly unprepared for the amount of crowds visiting that day.

We ended up leaving Calaway at about five, and honestly I'm so glad we left when we did as a huge hail storm ended up coming on, and we caught the tail end of it on the drive back to the hotel.

After our long exhausting day, the rest of the evening was spent swimming, enjoying take out Chinese food, and my stepdad informing my nephew and I about donkey baseball, which neither of us believed was an actual thing! (and guys, shockingly it is an actual thing).

Sunday:

Sunday was our last and final day of vacation. We would be checking out of the hotel and driving home, but before we headed for home, we had one more stop to make, and that was at the Calgary Zoo.

All of us but Jaaz had been to the zoo numerous times, but it had been a lot of years! We planned on this being a quick couple of hours visit, but we ended up being there almost six hours, and we all loved every minute of it.

The penguin exhibit was a favorite as always, the Canadian Wilds had a fun book that kids could fill out and get a special prize for doing so, lunch at the African cafe was delicious, and the relatively new Dinosaurs Alive exhibit was a hit with my whole family. Plus, they'd recently had a baby gorilla born at the zoo, and Jaazy and I were lucky enough to get to see it, although we weren't able to get a photo. Jaaz also loved the carousel and the train ride, and we all ended up wishing that we'd had two days at the zoo instead of one at Calaway.

The zoo was such a fun experience, and such a great ending to our vacation. I also love how all the revenue off of food and souvenirs here is used to care for animals, both at the zoo itself and in the wild.

With our day at the zoo complete, we headed for home, and although we all came home exhausted, we'd all had a great week, and I was feeling blessed to have gotten to spend this week with my family. I definitely missed my hubby and kitten, but it was a wonderful week!

Thanks for reading guys! I'll be back on Wednesday with a new Top 5 Wednesday post that I'm really excited about.

This is not a sponsored post. All opinions are my own. The photos were taken by me with an Iphone.