Congrats on picking Calgary as your drop-off point ... it's the second-best city in Canada (after Victoria, where I grew up). Your first stop should be the fabulous Calgary Zoo, followed by a tour of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame (located in the downtown core) and the Glenbow Archives. If you're renting a car to drive north to Jasper, allow yourself time for a day-long detour to the dinosaur graveyard at Drumheller, a small town in the Alberta badlands, about 2 hours northeast of Calgary and 2.5 hours south of Edmonton. This is one of the world's largest deposits of dinosaur fossils, and there's a great museum containing skeletal reconstructions. You can even sign up to go on an archeological dig! In Edmonton, check out the world's largest shopping mall (West Edmonton Mall), the Provincial Museum of Alberta (one of the world's largest collections of First Nations artifacts) and the sparkling new $800 million home of the NHL's Oilers, which is right downtown.
Enjoy the trip, eh?
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