Ours to discover no longer

Going backwards in time, despite our flux capacitor being on the fritz. We still had to go 88 miles per hour, though.

So sad to be leaving the province that they named a town after our general mood.

Our next prominent stop was Winnipeg, which was actually quite a nice town, that I would consider living in, if it wasn't in Manitoba. The parliament building looked like it could be the set for the next James Bond film, as the passageways were quite large, and it was very open-concept-y in general. Pictures won't do it justice, so I'll let your imagination do the work.

Here's an area that was pretty neat. The whole area is built in a depression in the ground, and circling the area that we're pictured jumping on are these metallic posts ("above" my head in the picture). If you read the inscription in front of the posts, there is a description of which stars line up with which posts at what part of the year. The metallic posts even have double circles that, if you stand in the exact centre of the structure, will line up with where the star should be. Very neat stuff. Unfortunately, we went there during the day, and it was cloudy.

This picture is meant to show our lucky timing. There was a flood (obviously still going on, but abated) in the Winnipeg area before our arrival, and some quite bad flooding in the prairies after our arrival in BC.

A labyrinth is not a maze. This is information that could have come to our attention in the brochure before we drove 30 minutes and got ourselves excited about it.

Please note how the lifeguards are dressed, particularly the one behind the other one in the corner. We went swimming anyhow. This is at grand beach, one of the top 10 beaches in North America. Very beautiful, and extremely vast. I can see how it would be pretty stellar on a hot sunny day. The beach stretches out for quite a ways before it drops off (we never figured out how far because we got cold and turned around).

We also made a crucial error at this juncture. We neglected to go to Gimli, a short 20-30 minutes away at this point, to pose with the world's biggest viking (statue). Personally, I would have gone with a giant dwarf, but that's just me.

Next stop: prairies! There was a lot of this...

Next entry won't be for a few days as I'm off surfing for a bit.