Rob-n-Hild, oot and aboot eh? Sorry - 2022

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Winnipeg - Riding Mountain National Park (305 km. 3.75 hours. Elevation maximum 682 metres)

We drove west out of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada highway (again) this morning - only now it is labelled as Highway 1, not 17 as it was called all the way through Ontario. Going east out of Winnipeg is flat - very flat - and right now very wet! The road is a couple of meters higher than the surrounding fields and in a lot of cases those fields are lakes right now because of flooding in the Red River - welcome to Lakefield! The good thing is that this seems to be fairly common here and it doesn't stop the soil here being very productive with almost the entire area under cultivation each year. This doesn't make for terribly exciting scenary - when you can see trees miles away - but it is fun to look at the agriculture along the way.

We had shared hotel for two nights in Winnipeg with many who had been evacuated from their homes due to floods also on Fisher River up north.

Sometimes we see less scary things along the road - like a travelling amusement park including with dragon boat ride!

After Portage la Prairie we turned north and started looking for a collapsed house Olav had photographed back in 1999 when he was in Canada. This was one of the must-do tasks for this day was a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack.

The photo below shows him and his colleagues surveying a house that was beyond repair even back then. We knew it was somewhere in the vicinity of Neepawa along some road. After some online research and Google-Streetview searching, Hild found the most likely road going north out of Neepawa. Amazingly, after half an hour driving Rob spotted it! See what 23 years can do to a wooden house and lake. House nearly all gone and lake over-grown.

Still, it was worth a photo-op and gave us a chance to stretch our legs. As Kristin pointed out, notice how Olav wields and ax and Hild wields an iPad. Times change!

When we got back to the car we realized that we were quite close to Big Valley Lookput Point. Well, we could not miss that. So we set off up the hill thinking that how big can a valley be in such a FLAT place? It turns out it can be quite big and our photos do not do it any justice. We couldn't drive the steep scenic route down to the valley floor and had to go back the same way we came (sound familiar?). The road was closed and had a lot of snow on it.

Because we took this detour we are happy to add ground squirrels to our list of species spotted. Hooray! They are so cute and so busy popping up and dipping back down into their burrows. What a delight to see them rushing around. They are so fast that we couldn't get a better photo of them - compared to one found in a book.

Going north also took us out of the prairies and into some more hilly country as we approached Riding Mountain National Park. It isn't quite like a mountain in Western Canada, but we are up over 600m now (from 200 in Winnipeg) so you have to allow for a bit of poetic license. Hild had spotted this park as a fun place to stay and it was booking a spot here that had decided our early timetable because we could only get a two night stay in a yurt at Wasagaming Campgrounds on the 8th and 9th of May. Yes, a yurt - a really fun little round tent with a solid floor tall enough to stand up in. Just what Robs was after (he is getting old for crawling into a tent on hands and knees.

Our yurt is fantastic. More like glamping than camping! There is electricity, but we expect not enough to power our electric kettle. There is a queen-sized bed, space for hanging clothes, table for eating/working, comfy sofa, and a deck for sitting outside.

Our own yurt - named the Yarrow Yurt (the plant "Ryllik" in Norwegian). We're guessing that there are yarrows growing in the area, or maybe they just use more or less random plant names like they do for all the roads in the Wasagaming township.

So after a late lunch and tea, we booted up for a walk around the area. We walked around the Wasagaming township and spotted several cute lawn ornaments: bison, moose, bever, and bears. We are still looking forward to the day we can add bever and bear to our list of species spotted.

We also walked through the boardwalks of Ominnik Marsh. It was fun to see frozen marshes that also sometimes lifted the boardwalks into fun angles! There were more traces of animals than actual animals since they are all still hiding from the snow and ice.

We spotted a big bever lodge and quite a bit of bever damage to trees in the area.

What was supposed to be an easy stroll turned into a two-hour 8k slog as we found that a lot of the paths were still knee-deep (sometimes thigh-deep) in snow! We should have had Adelheid's snowshowes.

Some paths were even lakes and we had to turn back and retrace our steps before getting back onto proper paths again. But we did develop a more organized approach to our Legolas-Gimli game first noted way back in Wawa. Hild is the best at this, as she has a better feeling for hard snow you can stand on (Legolas) as opposed to the soft snow you sink into (Gimli), but each step is still a bit of a lottery and calls of "Legolas, Legolas, aaagh, Gimli" rang out across the frozen lake more than once. Still in the end you can't complain when you get home with little more than damp boots and socks and maybe soggy trouser bottoms. The heater in the yurt took care of that overnight!

No Hild and Rob trip can be considered complete without at least one Rice-a-Roni dinner cooked on our Trangia stove. After the walk, we figured that tonight was the night as we could sit outside and stir - carefully -as the pot simmered away, and then letting it sit for a while (to finish cooking the rice) while we boiled water for tea. Luxury!

The fellas were more interested in the dessert - chocolate covered jujubes (our current constant craving only found in Shoppers Drugmart - if you are lucky and quick).

Oooooh, banana? Noooo, jujubes! - and mandarine eeek!

May/June 2022

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