Our guest post comes from Bill & Bonnie Neely of: Real Travel Adventures Ezine – Your free online monthly travel magazine with hundreds of features and photos on travel to anywhere.
Driving our RV across Manitoba, we scouted the highways north to south and east to west and saw pretty countryside changing to prairie and farmland with huge sky beautifully reflected in all the many lakes.
It’s a picturesque drive and almost totally flat, not unlike Kansas but with more trees and lakes. We often put in a long day because it isn’t dark in summer until nearly midnight in the upper regions of the province.
Our first destination was Winnipeg, the bustling capital city. On our first morning there we selected Assiniboinne Park, a picturesque park designed by the architect who laid out New York Central Park. It was fun watching moms with strollers, joggers, and many school groups visiting the wonderful Winnipeg Zoo.
Winnipeg claims to have so many restaurants that you could eat in a different one three meals a day for two years and never try them all. Is it true? Who knows! But we chose what surely must be the very best: Tavern in the Park, where we dined in the all-glass sun room overlooking the park. Our food was excellent and as pretty as it was delicious.
Next we moved downtown to spend some delightful hours at the Manitoba Art Museum. For the evening we moved to the vast center of evening events at The Forks, where the Red River and the Assiniboinne Rivers meet. What a well-planned place for all the after-work sports fun. It seemed the whole city had turned out on bicycles, skates, or with jogging shoes or balls to play for free family fun.
We had expected the Aboriginal Celebration there to be an Indian Powwow, as we had seen in Oklahoma, but instead it was a pop band concert with all modern native families in jeans and tee shirts listening to the music in the band shell while lounging on blankets and sharing picnics. The handmade items and other trinkets for sale in the stalls were varied.
We drove around the St. Boniface area, which is the old French Quarter and now has many eclectic restaurants, shops, and galleries.
We next headed up Highway 8 stopping at Riverton, a small community started by Icelandic and Ukrainian settlers. We drove all afternoon beside Lake Winnipeg, the 10th largest fresh water lake in the world. It was a gorgeous drive with swamps of tall grass, hundreds of birds, ducks, and geese. The fins, which are like many smaller lakes were all around us and everywhere the brilliant blue sky was reflected in all the waters, making a big sky appear even larger!
Each of the major National Parks in Canada has a small village in the center, with restaurants, gift shops, groceries, gas, etc., and rental properties for sleeping overnight or longer stays.
At the excellent Visitor Center a natural history museum shows many of the wild animals indigenous to Manitoba. The park has some of the largest black bears and moose in Canada. We watched a fascinating film about black bears.
We were amazed to watch a great gray owl fly in front of us several times, with a wingspan of over 3 feet. We tried a hike but the mosquitoes in the swampy area we had inadvertently selected were terrible, so we abandoned it.