Manitoba

26th July – 4th Aug 2019

Manitoba is a fine place. Little did we know but Lonely Planet have even named it as one of its top ten regions to visit in 2019. How fortuitous! A province of lakes, forests and miles and miles of prairie farmland sliced through by some of the straightest roads we have travelled, even when compared to our North Dakota days. Manitoba is roughly twice the size of New Zealand, with a population of around 1.3 million, less than the population of Auckland. More than half of these people live in or around the only major city, Winnipeg. In fact over 80% of all Canadians live in urban areas, so in a country that is larger than the USA by land area, with only 10% of its population, once you get out into the countryside this place is emptier than the B&Q pedestal fan aisle during a UK heatwave. Really empty.

We rolled across into Manitoba from Ontario soon after leaving Kenora on the Lake of the Woods and stopped at an information centre just across the border to pick up a highway map. I am a much happier passenger/navigator with good old fashioned paper cartography to back up the sometimes blinkered google navigation of our ‘lady-in-the-phone’, Mary-Lou. She can be blind to the big picture of getting from A to B. I also enjoy the dark art of in-car fold out map origami. During our planning of this stage of our trip we decided to minimise our single night stops as far as possible, so our next destination was a two night stay in a small lakeside town called Lac du Bonnet. It was a cute little holiday town with a small town beach and all the basic amenities. Our camp was about 4km down the road and owned and run by a delightful couple in their mid seventies. It was pretty sizeable and immaculately kept with acres and acres of tidy lawns, flower beds and newly planted trees. They still do all the maintenance and upkeep entirely themselves and it was exhausting to watch them in constant motion as we loafed in our chairs in the sun. Not only did they manage the campground, but adjoining it was a small piece of woodland through which they had cut and gravelled a maze of tracks leading to a plethora of huts and sheds containing fantastical dioramas with mannequins, decorations in the trees and nursery rhyme signs. It was charming and bizarre in equal measures. At Halloween they have actors dressed up in the various locations and have a little golf-cart ladybird train which takes local children around the wood after dark. This too they do all by themselves. Some people have more get up and go than others.

It was an easy flat cycle to town and we arrived to find the weekly market in full flow. This was mostly arts and crafts, with the odd vegetable thrown in for good luck. No coffee cart, however. There should always be coffee available at these gigs. We did our usual trick of wandering around, not buying anything and then sloped off to find a cafe for a caffeine fix. We then killed the thirty minutes needed until it was justifiably lunch time by cycling around looking at homes, real estate agent window displays and tat shops and then parked up at the beach. Here there was a food truck and we had a very satisfactory lunch of: beetroot and chickpea salad and taco fixings served on an opened a bag of cheesy Doritos . No prizes for guessing whose was whose… The small beach was very sweet and clean, had a safe swimming area cordoned off with buoys and a squadron of pelicans but was populated by some noisy mini-humans. I think they are called children. They made our ears hurts and despite having brought our swimmers, it wasn’t hot enough to need a swim. We cruised home to the peace and quiet of camp and lazed around until drink o’clock. Later that evening we spent a few hours chatting with our neighbours around their campfire. They only live a few hours away in Winnipeg, but quite often come to this camp for the weekend to get away from the city and go fishing on the lake.

Our next top along our road was a place called Grand Beach Provincial Park, about 90 km north of Winnipeg. It sits on the east shore of Lake Winnipeg which I had never heard of before but which is apparently the world’s 11th largest body of freshwater. The area along the east of the lake had some pristine boreal forests and rivers and had recently been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our camp was in the woods with a maze of loop roads and paths. The sites were large and private and we were only a 5 minute cycle ride from a 3 km beautiful white sandy beach. This beach has a fairly constant presence on the ‘top ten beaches in North America’ list and we see why. Despite the number of campsites in our park at the East end of the beach and the number of seasonal cottages down the other end of the West end of the beach there is minimal commercialisation of the area. At the West beach there is a small boardwalk which has a couple of food vendors and one small beachwear kiosk, but that was about it. This is in fairy sharp contrast to the origins of this as a beach resort. In the early 1900s the railroad came to this area facilitating the building and visiting of a large privately owned resort hotel here which opened in 1917. Winnipegians flocked to the resort by train for day trips (the last train back to the city leaving at midnight) or longer stays and at one point it boasted the Commonwealth’s largest dancehall pavilion. Its success was only curtailed in the 1950s when a devastating fire destroyed the dancehall, a tragedy that the resort never really recovered from. At some point the resort closed and the land passed to the Provincial Park Service, who have maintained its low key magnificence ever since. We had two full days here. On the first we cycled around to the other end of the beach, about 5-6km via the road. It was a very windy day with a seemingly constant headwind in both directions. How is that possible? It was warm, but the lake was boasting some seriously impressive white horses and surf, so was closed for swimming, not that you’d think that as there was a not insignificant number of people splashing around in its murky shore break. It was generally fairly quiet though as the wind was leaving no nook nor cranny without high pressure sand ingress meaning sitting around on the beach was not for the fainthearted. The next day was much calmer. We walked a nearby loop track, keeping an eye and ear open for bears. (None). We had a few hours on the beach, swam, soaked up some rays and watched the boats tow people about on the flat water. It is at times like this that we really miss our boat. Should be waterskiing….

From Grand Beach we headed south again, skirted around the north of Winnipeg and headed west along a section of the Trans Canadian Highway into the ongoing prairie lands of southern Manitoba. We caught a glimpse of Winnipeg’s skyline from a distance, but were glad to be avoiding it. The land is very flat here. They say that if your dog slips its collar, you can see it running away for hours and hours. There are endless miles of arable land, planted in wheat and barley, corn and canola. The best business to be in seems to be the sales of massive bits of farm machinery to tame it all. This night was a single night stay in one of the few larger towns outside Winnipeg, Portage La Prairie. The park did have a pool, but was a ‘child noodle soup’ of noise and merriment that we decided against joining. We did laundry instead and then took a stroll around the rather lovely wooded park, admiring some of the set-ups of the seasonal campers. Large trailers were enhanced with decks, summer houses, elaborate fire pits, decorations and plant pots. The sky was filled with the booms of an approaching thunder storm and there was a weather watch in place for hail. The rain started just as we were sitting down outside to eat our dinner. We pulled the table under the awning but it gave no protection against the quickly monsoonal downpour, so we retreated inside. The thunder and lightening continued for hours and the rain was so loud on the roof that it was pointless to try and watch a DVD. Nothing to do except gaze up at it all happening through the skylight. In the morning our next door neighbour told us that hailstones the size of baseballs had fallen 50km to the north. Glad that missed us.

From Portage La Prairie we headed north, leaving the Trans Canadian Highway to join the Yellowhead Highway. This, and the Yellowhead Pass which is its route across the Rockies, is named for a French fur trapper and explorer Pierre Bostonais. He had blond streaks in his hair and was nicknamed ‘Tête Jaune’, or Yellowhead. It seems that there isn’t a lot in this part of the world that wasn’t discovered, founded or started by a French fur trapper. The road was very straight and continued to take us though flat prairie lands until we started to hit some subtle undulations in terrain. The prairies were finally giving way to some low-lying hills that led us to our next destination, Riding Mountain National Park. Now ‘mountain’ is a strong term for this area, but we did climb 500m and the views changed from crops to woods and lakes again. We had booked a site in a large campsite in the small holiday town of Wasagaming, on the shores of Clear Lake. Population 400 in the winter, up to 30,000 on peak summer holiday weekends, like this one.

The town and campsite both sit within the National Park boundary, so again, despite having a nice selection of eateries and shops, it was very pleasantly uncommercialised. Our site was massive and had a family of ground squirrels living nearby to keep us entertained. We were warned about the black bears but didn’t see any evidence of them. There was lots to do in and around town without needing to drive into the park wilderness. On one day we hired kayaks for a few hours and cruised up the lakeshore to the north, another day we cycled along a lakeside trail that went to the south. The cycle trip included a picnic lunch and a swim from a small quiet beach that was far from the madding crowd of the town beach. From all angles there was the constant amusement of the antics of the boaters. It was a large lake with plenty of space for all but there seemed a compulsion to be whizzing up and down the shore in close proximity to one another or all mooring up in the same bays, cheek by jowl. (Is it a pack mentality or a need to show off?) We drank in a bar called Canoe and ate in a restaurant called Wigwam. The sun shone and the good times keep a’rolling.