MANITOBA

Today, August 16th, we are in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario but I will go back to where we left off and tell you about our days in Manitoba first.

Okay, so Sunday, August 7th, we left Saskatchewan and headed to Tim and Adele Pizzey's and Garth and Annabelle McDonald's to see where they live.  The only unfortunate thing was that on the way we got late and it was dark before we made it to their home and everyone knows the greatest hazard of driving in the dark on the prairies is running into a deer.  Well, we did just that, I hit a deer about 6 miles from our destination.  After this small blimp we made it to the farm around midnight to enjoy some catching up until 2 am.  We all had a very good day on the farm.  The girls got some great prairie experiences even going gopher hunting with the boys.  For supper we all rode quads, dirt bikes, or gators to the creek where it meets the Assiniboine River and had a wiener roast on the banks of the river.  It was a truly wonderful day.  The next day we went on to Grand Beach but not until Adele had washed off the motor home - oh, I forgot to mention that the boys even fixed my headlight that had popped out because of our close encounter with the deer.  With this kind of treatment it was hard to leave such kindness.

Well if you have never been to Grand Beach on Lake Winnipeg I would highly recommend a visit.  The campsite was beautiful with lots of trees and the beach was incredible with sand as soft as powder.  The white sand beaches and sand dunes go on for miles and the water stretches on forever.  We had an absolutely sublime day at the beach with crystal clear blue skies and high temperatures.  The girls had lots of fun in the water which was quite shallow so they could venture out a long ways and not be above their heads.  Once they were tired of playing in the water they went over the dune and collected frogs from the swampy waters on that side of the dunes.  They were quite convinced that they should each keep a frog and take them on the trip with us to bring home and show Makinna.  (Sorry to say the one frog we kept the longest died two days ago.)  I let them keep the frogs in an outside storage bin because I refused to have a frog loose in the motor home.  We planned to bike to the West Beach after supper but we got about half way there and a young man coming the other direction warned us that there was a black bear on the road, so we turned around and went back to the campsite.  The next day we went over in the motor home to check out the West Beach which is the more popular beach.  It was also a beautiful beach with a boardwalk and vendors.  If we weren't trying to get all the way across Canada we would love to have spent more time here.

 Our first look at East Beach.

Collecting frogs. 

 More East Beach.

 Beautiful West Beach

Thursday we made our way into Winnipeg to pick up Kent, he was flying in from Kelowna.  We had agreed to meet at Costco so I would not have to drive the motor home to the airport.  But, my mistake, we went to the wrong Costco, thankfully the right one was close by and we got Kent. :) We were so happy to have daddy back with us.  This puts an end to our days in Manitoba, for now.