Manitoba Waterworld

Today we were full of plans to tour all the sights that Southern Manitoba had to offer, but unfortunately Mother Nature had other ideas. If anyone had been following the news over the last two months, you'll know that Southern Manitoba has been struggling with flooding issues since the spring thaw started, well it turns out that they're still having issues with it. It was that and a myriad of other places just seemed to collude to screw over tourists.

We were going to go to the Mint, the one in Winnipeg is where they print all the money and coinage in circulation, and they have tours of the plant to learn how it's all made. Well, we rolled into town on Sunday so they were closed, which is fine, it's a government building and it was the weekend. Then it turns out that they are also closed on Monday, so we completely got to miss out. It was very disappointing.

Then we were going to go to the house of Louis Riel, one of the founding fathers of Manitoba and a very controversial figure. Well that plan flew as far as a lead balloon once we found out the house doesn't open until May 23rd, so that we cancelled as well. So basically we ended up going over to the forks park and looking around for the legislature yesterday evening, and today we woke up, hit up the Tim Horton's for breakfast, and then hit the road out of Winnipeg.

The plan was to visit a provincial park that contained a small patch of desert. Now this isn't the sort of pretend desert where it's really hot and sorta sandy, this is the whole sort of desert where it is legitimately a desert, with all sort of sand and the hot and the dryness. Surely if that didn't work out we could always visit and number of other attractions in Southern Manitoba. Well sure enough, as we progressed across the province we started to see pictures like this:

Any higher and we wouldn't have made it to Regina, or at least we would have had an impromptu 40,000 leagues under the sea reenactment

And this...



I don't think that road is supposed to go into the river, then again maybe it's a super aqua road! 

 So you can see where this is going. We got to Spruce Woods Provincial Park and not only was the highway going towards it closed, I have it on good authority (The district park office) that the road towards that section on the park was under 10 feet of water. In fact the whole park except for the southernmost part was under water apparently, so that was a bust.

Continuing on we decided to take a detour to Souris, Manitoba, which according to the Canada Coast to Coast book I have on loan from Sandra was the 'prettiest town on the praries'. Well I don't know about the prettiest, but it was certainly a town on the prairies. It seemed to have hit a bit of a hard time in the downtown area but the touristy part was still in tact. It was home to Canada's longest suspension pedestrian bridge, at 177m it crosses the Assiniboine river. Even though it was over 100km away from the most swollen part of the river, the water level was still high enough to close the bridge. So while we were there, and we took pictures of it, we were not allowed to go over it. Likely because it's supports were under water. The local museum was closed as well, not to open until Canada day, of course.

It's pretty long, it's also pretty not walkable, sort of defeating the purpose of a walking bridge.

Not all was lost on our trip to Souris though, the town also had a large gravel pit that was full of semi-precious stones. Once you get a permit to enter the site, you can go and dig to your hearts content. Now I have a partial interest in geology, but more on the end of already having the stones and looking at them, but Geoff is much more interested so we got the permit and went over to the pit. It was a pretty large place, and it has an active gravel operation, but it covered 12 acres so we just went where they weren't. There was loose rocks and dirt everywhere, but there was also quite a bit of semi-precious stones strewn about. We spent about an hour and a bit wondering around the site, trying to find lots of agates and other sort of gemstones.

If this picture had a tactile component, it would be gritty dirt, gritty dirt EVERYWHERE

After Souris we wrote off the rest of Manitoba and just put the petal to the metal (Figuratively, not literally after Thunder Bay's ticket incident) to get to Saskatchewan. We got the Saskatchewan to receive a warm welcome from local staff at the information bureau. Just kidding, with our luck today the information bureau was closed due to construction, the most welcome we got was from the sign letting us know we were entering Saskatchewan, and it wasn't even that inspiring.

Even the sign looks like it's being sarcastic. 'This is Saskatchewan, what more could you possibly need to know? Naturally, nothing"

However Saskatchewan did live up to it's reputation for being incredibly flat. It wasn't quite as dramatic as I thought it would be, going from tree line to flat, horizonless wasteland, but it still got pretty flat. I have a feeling that this flatness will intensify as we move through the province tomorrow.

Remove those power lines and it would feel like you'd fall straight into the sky

Although Saskatchewan was less undulated with water, I don't have much hope to see anything too exciting along the way. So I believe we're just going straight to Calgary tomorrow where we will be spending a few days there and the surrounding areas. If there is anything that is exciting to do along the Trans-Canada in Saskatchewan, let me know in the comments.

We finished up the day in Regina, where after checking in to the motel we took a trip over to Wascana park. This place is really neat because of it's history. When they were settling Regina, they damned up the Wascana river to create a reservoir of water for the city to use. However, over time the city developed around it although never into it. Eventually the whole area was classified as an urban park and buildings developed inside of it rather than through it. So in modern day Regina you have this great big park in the middle of the city. According to my travel book the whole park land is eight times the size of the downtown core, although it didn't look it, there may have been more park than we walked around it.

We went for a nice walk around the whole lake in the heart of the city, taking in the sights such as the legislature and the lake itself. As the sun was setting it made for a very memorable picture. I don't think I captured any myself with the camera, but certainly with my mind.

Imagine being able to see this on your lunch hour next time you eat lunch at your desk/breakroom

As mentioned in the previous post, I want to see the legislature of every province I visit if I have never been there before, so of course we have a picture of that too:

Apparently the founders of Saskatchewan had grand ideas for their province, based on the size of the legislature.

Like I mentioned earlier, tomorrow I believe is going to be a straight shot to Calgary where we will be settling for a few days to take in the sites around the city like Banff, Drumheller, etc. I'm armed with some travel information of places to see in Saskatchewan, but if anyone has any suggestions for locations west of Regina, I'm definitely all ears. Just email me or leave a note in the comments, I'll try to get to them while I'm on the road.