Where's the Tribute to the Olympic Games?

In a word, today was disappointing. Mom and Dad set off for the Olympic park with high hopes of seeing lots of memorabilia and nice tributes to the 1988 Olympics. To be fair, it has been many years and maybe Canadian citizens no longer were coming to the venue for 26 year old Olympic Games so someone was ingenious enough to turn the area into a money maker, but Mom felt they could have done a much better job blending old with new. Here's how their day went according to them:

First, the grounds were pretty unkept and after such pristine conditions in downtown Calgary and Cochrane, we expected similar. We did play silly tourist and took our pictures in old Canadian and Jamaican bobsleds (this was the first game the Jamaicans raced in you might recall).

There really weren't any displays about the games, they capitalized on the name Olympics, but that's where it ended. This is now a thrill sports area for Mountain Bikers and ATVs and the grounds look like it, overgrown weeds were everywhere. The ski jump is used for a zip line, while the chair lift is used to take bikers/bikes up the ski lift.

Clearly this is a moneymaker as we saw hundreds of mountain bikers. Unfortunately the luge was not the luge we were thinking, it was the same ride that we have seen at numerous summer ski resorts, so no real appeal for us to ride.

We headed over to the bobsled, but it was a fake bobsled on wheels that ran down the track, so no refrigeration system as claimed, a $65 less than a minute ride. We passed!

We didn't mind that they found multi uses for the park, but it was the lack of anything about the Olympics that disappointed, we could have been at any ATV mountain bike place pretty much, even the one symbol we found, a cauldron, was small and rusty, kind of sad. We saw much prettier summer ski resorts at Breckenridge and Vail last year.

We ended the afternoon at a local brewery for some okay beers.

Tomorrow we leave for Banff Natuonal Park, we are so hoping for good weather for spectacular hiking. We are staying in the National Park so no wifi, but we will catch you up when we can!