The MTT Music Festival

Calgary has new music festival. Created by the gentlemen behind the Music Times Two Blog/Online Music Magazine, this weekend the MTT Festival will rock the city to dangerous levels of cool and will test your personal threshold for awesome.

This weekend the two day Festival will feature 30 acts, most of them either renowned Indie bands or relative newcomers. For more info on the event, see the Music Times Two Blog, and for tickets Click Here. If you want up to the minute updates on guests and showtimes you can also follow them on their Facebook Page.

Sponsors for the event include our sister hotel in downtown Calgary, the Nuvo Hotel Suites, which is offering a %10 discount on room rates for concert-goers. If you don't want to stay with us for some reason ( I can't think of one), then give them a call.

The Centro Motel is Calgary’s first Boutique Motel. Located in the Montgomery neighbourhood, just south of Calgary’s Motel Village. The Centro offers stylish, trendy rooms at competitive prices. For more information on booking, rooms and rates, check out the home page, or Contact Us.

What's The Best RV to Tour Alberta With?

I've talked before about some of the best drives you can go on in Alberta, but now that is Spring, horrible, horrible Spring is around the corner I thought I'd revisit the topic and expand on it. As Calgary's first Boutique Motel, the Centro sees a lot of RV's coming through. However, we also get asked, on occasion, about what the best RV's to rent are. That's a complicated question, and the best answer is to find the RV that works best for your needs. For the purposes of this article, however, I'm going to go with the normal traveller who needs an RV and intends to be on the move with it a lot. That means a Class “C” Motorized RV is the way to go, and there's a few that come out ahead of the rest.

Bigfoot

 

While the company recently went out of business, you can still find a lot of these on the roads. The company closed it's doors after the recession in the United States killed off %90 of their business, but you shouldn't let that deter you. Their RVs are consistently one of the highest scoring in terms of Performance on the Road, Reliability, Safety, Cost of Maintenance and Comfort.

Lazy Daze

Another stellar choice in terms of Reliability and Performance, Lazy Daze units tend to have a bit more focus on Comfort, making them a great choice for longer trips. Check them out at www.lazydaze.com;or read some testimonials here:

- Life with with a lazy daze

Vixen 21 XC

 

This one is a legend. The Vixen 21 XC is powered by a BMW m21 turbo diesel engine. With the combination of a Renault 5-speed manual trans axle, it gets between 30-35 mpg. The suspension is Chevy g20, and the frame is made partly from the same Chevy g20. The body is fiberglass. The engine is mounted in the rear of the vehicle and is mounted backwards, so the engine time belt/water pump is right in the back. For those who don't speak car, it means that the Vixen is great on gas, and the utilities are very conveniently located.

The Centro Motel is Calgary’s first, and most RV friendly, Boutique Motel. Located in the Montgomery neighbourhood, just south of Calgary’s Motel Village, the Centro offers stylish, trendy rooms at competitive prices. Also, our parking lot is just massive. For more information on booking, rooms and rates, check out the home page, or Contact Us.



Scenes From Montgomery (Happy New Year from Centro)

Well, it's been a very interesting first year in business for the Centro Motel. Our integration into the rapidly developing Montgomery community has been surprisingly rewarding, and not entirely without surprises.

What at first appears to be a normal run-of-the-mill Calgary community has surprising depth. At first I thought to attempt to describe the community we thrive in in a lengthy blog post, but I ran into a few problems.

First, how do you accurately describe the 'feel' of a community? It's easy to write things like 'Montgomery is a small community located just south of Motel Village', or 'we're the westward vista you are presented with when looking out the windows of the Alberta Children's Hospital'. However, objective descirptions fail utterly at conveying the spirit of the neighborhood.

Second, how can one individual express the totality of a whole community's worth of individuals? You can't. Or, at least, I can't.

So, I came up with the idea of a photo-blog style post. Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? And these are pictures I took myself, along with pictures from a photographer's photo-blog and the nices shots I could pul off of Gogle Earth. So, these thousands of words aren't just mine. They're ours.



Fishing the Bow River Near Centro Motel

The other day I was going for a run on the river trails near the Centro Motel, making my way downstream and then up to motel village, when I saw two people fly-fishing in the Bow River. I’ve already mentioned the excellent trails, and a few other good things about the Bow River, but I have so far neglected to write about the excellent trout fishing. So, for that I apologise.

            The Bow River is also known as the “Bue Ribbon Bow” to fishermen. While it’s possible to find some Rocky Mountain Whitefish in the Bow, the main fish population is composed of Rainbow Trout, Brook trout, Bull Trout in the upper reaches, and Cutthroat Trout. The quality of the fishing on the river is renowned for both the quantity and size of the trout dwelling in its frigid streams. This is not to say that those fish are living in the stretch of the river that flows through Calgary. While the Bow River is a tremendous fishery, the best fishing is, sadly, not found in Calgary. For that you might want to check out the links posted at the bottom of the article.

            However, there’s still some pretty nice fish to be had within the City limits, and there’s some pretty idyllic fishing spots along the banks near the Centro Motel. If you don’t want to bring your own fishing gear, there are plenty of rental spots near the Centro, just south of Motel Village.     

            The Centro Motel is Calgary’s first Boutique Motel. Located in the Montgomery neighbourhood, just south of Calgary’s Motel Village, The Centro offers stylish, trendy rooms at competitive prices. For more information on booking, rooms and rates, check out the home page, or Contact Us.

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• Lets Fly Fish



Running Around Centro

            As much as I complain about the short sightedness of the Calgary city planners, the city has some aspects that I wholeheartedly appreciate. One of those aspects is the 600+ kilometres of multi-purpose trails weaving around the city. The Centro Motel, and the whole Montgomery neighbourhood come to think of it, is in a pretty good location in terms of access to these trails. I’ve listed a few of them below, along with a link to a pretty good website that lists many more. Stay tuned, because there’s a rumour in the wind that Centro will be acquiring a small fleet of bicycles for the use of its guests...

 

10K Point to Point

            This is a simple run that starts in SHouldice park, across 16^th Ave from the Centro Motel, and goes all the way to the Sunnyside C-Train station in the Trendy Kensignton area. Of course, the problem with this run is that the C-Train doesn’t run anywhere near the Centro, which kind of leaves you high and dry for a ride back to the Motel. However, if you head back to the Centro at the Crowchild Trail intersection you can get a pretty good 12K run. Or, you can go for the gusto and make it a full 20K...  

20K Training Route

            The first step to training for a marathon is to pick a few good training routes. Lengthy trails with a good mix of terrain are essential in order to build endurance and to learn technique. This is a great trail for exactly those reasons, however anyone starting from the Centro will have to play around with the route a little bit. You can check out the map below if you like, but basically you can drop in right around the 8K mark and run in either direction. Heading north and west will run you along the edge of the Bowmont Park Natural Area, and is a great choice for a more scenic run.

            I pulled these runs from www.run.com. There are many, many other possible running routes but I’ll leave it up to you to find some for yourself.  

            Now, these bikes that I was talking about are not for sure, and they won’t be anything too fancy, but I personally hope that they'll end up being something like one of these.

            The Centro Motel is Calgary’s very first Boutique Motel. Located in the Montgomery neighbourhood, near motel village and the Foothills and Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Centro Motel provides stylish, comfortable, and affordable accommodations.