Day 106 – July 18

Undone again by an unmarked time zone change we were off on our planned day in Winnipeg a little later than expected. Our first stop was the Assiniboine Park, according to our tourist information, the home of the Winnipeg Zoo, a sculpture garden, a gallery and areas of open space. The sculpture garden was what we wanted to see so after finding a spot for the beast in one of the many parking lots we headed in that direction.

True to the guide books there were substantial expanses of open space. The sculpture garden was adjacent to a beautiful English Garden with interconnecting hard surface circular paths. A crew of gardeners were busy removing plants that were past their peak while a small rabbit was busy munching on the fresh green leaves of the new plants. All of of the numerous pieces in the sculpture garden were the work of sculptor, Leo Mol, and most of them were commissions by local families and businesses. It did strike me as somewhat strange however that the sculptures could generally be split into two categories, old men with their clothes on and young thin women with, yes you guessed it, their clothes off and being made of bronze clearly showing the effects of the cold. Just saying.

Just saying…

On our way back to the vehicle we saw a sign for a gallery in one of the attractive buildings that skirted the open space. We went inside and spent an hour walking the three levels of the gallery. Of great interest was the Winnie the Pooh gallery. You may recall that the famous primary character of A.A. Milne’s iconic tales, Winnie the Pooh, was named after the city of Winnipeg. A Canadian soldier had bought the bear, which he named Winnipeg after the his adopted home town, and when transferred to England ended up donating him to the London zoo where A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, became fascinated with him, shortening his name to Winnie. And the rest, as they say, is history. It was Interesting to see some of the original illustrations from the pen of E.H. Shepard. A.A. Milne recognized that the illustrations played such an important role in the popularity of his work that he shared his royalties with Shepard.

After leaving the park we crossed back over the Assiniboine River and headed towards downtown, specifically the Forks, named after the adjacent confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. We found a metered spot of substantial size for the BRT and walked down to visit the market, a space very reminiscent of the Saint John’s city market. We had lunch there and walked back to the BRT past the still-under-construction Museum of Human Rights, a striking building scheduled to open in 2014.

The Forks Market

Future Museum of Human Rights

As our curb side parking spot became a traffic lane at 3:30 we had to move to a parking lot before heading north into Winnipeg’s Exchange District, where many of Winnipeg’s older buildings are located. In walking through the area we came across the main stage of Winnipeg’s long standing Fringe Festival which had just started the day before. We listened to one of the performers and visited some of the many kiosks that filled the surrounding public space offering everything from henna tattoos and vintage clothes to balloon sculptures. There was a contagious party atmosphere in the area and one amusing character who stood in front of the main stage dancing who, based on his enthusiastic but spastic moves, was either a disciple of the ‘dance like no one is watching’ philosophy or a recent graduate of the Elaine Benis School of Dancing.

The Exchange District

Dance Like No One is Watching

We headed back to the BRT and after giving brief consideration to having dinner at a restaurant decided we were too tired to enjoy the treat and headed to our campsite, the Rocky Garden RV Park north of Richer, about 20 minutes away. We had reserved a spot by email earlier in the day. Hoping to snag a pizza on the way we saw every other kind of fast food except that so we were enticed by the fruit stand at the Richer turn off which advertised fresh corn. Run by a personable character who could have sold parkas in the Gobi desert we sampled several of his fresh produce. At his insistence we took a bite from a raw peaches and cream ear of corn to taste the sweetness. By the time we left we had our corn (including the gratis ear we had sampled), potato and cheese pierogis, honey, local strawberries, cherries and white organic nectarines from California that made nectarines I had before seem bland, these were so sweet.

We checked into our site and were quickly set up. Supper was straightforward – pan fried pierogis, fresh corn and strawberries with the last of our Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for desert. We had been in touch with Ken during the day hoping to meet up with him on his much faster paced drive to Nova Scotia but realized this wasn’t practical. After supper while we watched a video on TV a thunder storm passed through, notable not for its multiple flashes of lightning and associated thunder so much as by its torrential rain. It was so loud inside our little fiberglas tube that we literally could not hear the TV at full volume. As it was already dark there was no way to check to see if there was a funnel cloud associated with this I checked on line for tornado alerts in the area. In my mind RV parks look a lot like mobile home parks, known tornado magnets, so I was being extra vigilant.

The storm passed as quickly as it arrived and by the time we went to bed the sky was clear and full of stars.