ON TO MANITOBA

---

ON TO MANITOBA

Saturday, 16 June ‘07

At least breakfast from the restaurant at our “divey” hotel was tasty - and really, I’d had as good a night’s sleep there as at a fancier place, so it really wasn’t THAT bad. We then headed west on Hwy 11 to Hwy 71, which would take us close to Kenora, en route to Winnipeg. Passing the line-up of cars to the bridge to the US, there must have been 50 or more cars, many towing small boats, for fishing, lined up single file along the curb, a line stretching for blocks. I’m not sure I’d want to do anything that badly to get into a line like that.

After singing the praises of Bob’s GPS yesterday (it told us of a short-cut we’d not known about), today it went all wacky. Hwy 71 takes you north to Hwy 17, although Winnipeg is obviously to the west of the highway. For some reason it wanted us to take a direct route, which would have meant crossing the Lake of the Woods, and there ain’t no bridge there. Miss Casparitis, which is what we have dubbed the female voice that tells us when to turn, kept telling us to turn left, did so for quite a ways. Good thing we also have maps to guide us.

At Kenora we stopped for coffee & lunch & I picked up some supplies from their Canadian Tire (like ACE Hardware), in the same plaza as a WalMart & next to a big Home Hardware store. I’d walked from where we’d gotten the coffee (a Timmy’s), and Bob was to pick me up. But somehow he did not see the big Canadian Tire store, only their gas bar, and went first to the WalMart, then to the Home Hardware to find me. Meanwhile I’d walked back to where I’d left him, thinking that perhaps he’d decided to wait for me, and it was only on my return to the C.T. store that we “found” each other - at least it wasn’t my screw-up this time (as it often is...)

We ate our lunch at a local ball diamond, and afterwards Bob got Panna playing a bit, running the bases - guess who was more pooped after that.

Finally crossed into Manitoba, after 3+ days on the road in Ontario. Man, that’s one big province! (I know it might have been shorter had we taken the “southern” route, which goes into & out of the US, but we really didn’t want to get into border hassles, what with the van full of stuff & the dog too) In Winnipeg we stayed at a Travelodge, not a bad place, but only two stories, with no elevator, which again meant carrying stuff up stairs manually. I’d have let Panna’s crate remain in the van, but don’t really want her to get in the habit of sleeping in bed with me. So Bob made another 50 trips (or so it seemed to him) to the van for our stuff. After dinner we took a walk around the area - there was a pretty high-class group of houses nearby, across from a golf course. There also were about 30 trillion mosquitoes in the area, and Panna woke them all by running through the tall grass along the side of the road. I seem to recall hearing a few years ago on the news that Winnipeg was considered to be the “Mosquito Capital of Canada” - some claim to fame. There was a nice (probably) indoor pool in a courtyard at the hotel & our rooms fronted that courtyard. Boy did it get loud, especially in the evening when the young adult males joined the younger kids there - fortunately it closed at 11 PM, but it was pretty noisy just prior to that.

---