| rev:text
| - I'm not sure about Canadians, but for Americans, Heritage Park is like a cross between Colonial Williamsburg and Disney's Magic Kingdom. A family friendly attraction, it focuses on presenting realistic historical vignettes from the history of Calgary and Alberta, while still having enough things of interest to the younger set, like wagon rides, animals, and a small area with a carousel and other rides for little ones.
Like the Magic Kingdom, one approaches Heritage Park with a long walk from the parking lot (not so long that it involves public transportation, however). As you approach the admissions booth, there a few things you can see for free: small shops, a restaurant, and Gasoline Alley, a small museum devoted to automobile history.
After paying the $25 entrance fee, most people go straight to the Midnapore train station (Just as an aside, Midnapore sounds to me like the name of a town in India, not Canada. I suppose it could be a Commonwealth coincidence.) The tracks loop around the park and the central lake, and most of the time the train stops at each of the three stations along the way.
I visited the park with a friend, and my interests were mostly historical. Also, we were only going to be spending a couple of hours there, so rather than see the whole park, we devoted most of our time to the station that led to the First Nations tepee and the representation of the earliest European colonists. We spent about an hour visiting the old schoolhouse, meeting room, trader's shops and saloon, all from roughly the 18th and 19th century. Ordinarily we would have come back to the train station and taken the next train to the next stop, but it so happened that the conductor was on a lunch break, so rather than wait for the train, we walked through a slightly more modern area, with farm animals and people in historical costumes representing townspeople from perhaps a hundred years ago. When I first looked at the map we were given at the gate, I was concerned that the distances would be too far to walk, but it turned out that the map made the park look rather larger than it was, and we were able to walk back the whole distance that the train had brought us in about 20 minutes.
I enjoyed seeing what the Calgary area might have looked like a couple hundred years ago. I had a nice chat with the young lady in historical costume in the old schoolhouse, turns out she's studying to be a teacher and we talked a bit about how education has changed. We also saw a group of young girls in historical costumes going into one building. We were curious about whether they had any connection to the park employees, or maybe they were on a field trip during summer vacation. If I'm ever in the Calgary area again, I'd like to go back and see more of the park. I'm glad Calgary is making this effort to preserve and represent its history.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)