In my family, we joke that we eat our steaks so rare, with good medical care they would be up and mooing again. The first thing I ask people when I find out they're "from here," is "which high school did you go to?" If I had a horse that tripped in holes.

I would have no problem shooting gophers stone cold dead. I can tell you where I was the night the flame went out in '88, and I like my tickets infield. In short, I am Calgarian . . . which is why I feel disloyal and dismayed to say that I absolutely, positively love Vancouver.

It surprises me not one bit that it scored number 4 on the worldwide list of the best cities to live in. I've been there many times before, but for some reason this time it struck me differently. If you have a child who plays spring hockey, you may have just spent some time in this exquisite city that each year hosts thousands of smelly, brutish teenagers in what is one of Western Canada's largest minor hockey tournaments.

The gig starts at an indoor eight-plex arena, be still my heart, complete with an overhead lounge that runs the length of the facility -- proof that if you build it, they will come. Games 2 and 3 were lost at an indoor four-plex arena. So too were Games 3 through 5 -- only it was a different indoor four-plex. We didn't even get to see all the indoor fourplexes the city had to offer, due to not quite making it past Round 2. The facilities were just jaw-dropping impressive.

Then there's the spotless, efficient, SkyTrain. It goes everywhere we seemed to need it to go, including suburb-towns half an hour away. And as travellers have come to expect in sophisticated cities everywhere, it's a beeline to the airport (thus avoiding the whole peevish "who gets to play park-the-taxi-cab" game).

If you don't want to take the SkyTrain, there are stretches where you can bike safely through traffic in lanes partitioned with concrete barriers. That's right -- no more lining up behind someone defiantly teetering in a rut in front of your SUV at a speed which -- and on a device that called anything else, would get them a ticket. Or on the other hand, no arrogant SUV drivers clip your elbow passing you 10 metres before a red light. Pedestrians stick to the sidewalk. It's peaceful coexistence.

There's public art everywhere you look. And it's real art, not giant frog benches and painted cows, but green glazed statutes, massive blown glass things, poetry phrases writ large on skyscrapers, and outdoor installations of what can only be called stuff that can only be called creative. There's a busker singing maybe Andrew Byrd, playing maybe a 12-string Guild on every corner, and it smells like shawarma, Kung-pao and the world's best eclair all at the same time; sushi's cheap as borscht.

Even without the ocean and the cherry blossoms, Vancouver is flat out intoxicating to every urban sense and sensibility.

I'm not saying B.C. doesn't have its own problems, and they're quite well dressed at the moment, having just hosted the world at that little ditty called the Olympics. Nonetheless, a trip to Vancouver demonstrates that there's a lot more to living the good life than how well the streets are scraped.

For the first time ever I came back to Calgary and saw perhaps what others do, what I have defended against so vigorously; it looked like a small town. For whatever reason, and in many ways, Calgary is behind on the big basket of goodies that make life better -- and not just for the few who cash in on royalties and stock options. We have a job opening for a Calgary visionary in the form of a new mayor, and we get to do the hire. Let's make sure it's a big-thinker, someone who can see beyond chicken coops and parking meters.

A few years ago Cassie Campbell spoke at the mayor's sports luncheon, and thanked parents who made the effort and found the money to get their kids to out-of-town tournaments. She said she recalled going to a lot of places and playing a lot of games, but never remembering the score or whether her team won or lost. All she remembers is how great the water-slides were.