Leaving Ontario for Manitoba

Ontario is BIG! While we already knew that, it still surprises us every time we drive north. After driving for a month, with no extra-long stops, we are still in what those of us from the south call Northern Ontario. In reality, we aren’t even halfway to the far north of the province!

We arrived at Kenora’s Anicinabe Park Campground on a Sunday afternoon. The campground was just a short bike ride from the city centre, and Kenora is lovely. We had heard good things about the boat tour of Lake of the Woods, only to find out that it doesn’t operate on Mondays. Thanks to traveling in our motorhome, we are very flexible, so instead of staying two nights, we quickly changed our plan to three.

On Monday, we rode our e-bikes around Rabbit Lake, which was great. Many of these small towns have put a lot of effort into creating bicycle and pedestrian paths throughout their communities, making them so much easier to explore by bike.

The highlight of our stay in Kenora was that boat tour on Lake of the Woods. I had always liked the name “Lake of the Woods” and caught glimpses of it while passing through in 2014, but I really had no idea how vast it actually was until we completed an informative tour of a small northern section of the lake.

The aptly named Lake of the Woods has 14,522 islands in it. And every island appears to be covered in trees. The lake spans parts of Ontario, Manitoba and Minnesota. Including the shoreline of all the islands, Lake of the Woods has roughly 105,000 km of shoreline. The lake has a surface area of 4,350 km2. Just think, if you visited a different island every day, it would take 40 years to visit all the islands in Lake of the Woods. We never got off the boat. So we didn’t visit any of them, but we did see way to many to count as we cruised by. Many of the islands are privately owned and quite a few have beautiful homes. If you paddled your canoe around every island in the lake, you would have paddled a distance equal to more than 2 ½ times the circumference of the earth.

The city of Winnipeg, our next stop as we travel west, receives its drinking water via an aqueduct that was built in 1919. That aqueduct in which water flows by gravity is about 159 km long and extends from Shoal Lake to Winnipeg which receives water from Lake of the Wood’s.

We were really lucky to find that Winnipeg’s Annual Folklorama Festival was underway. The festival spans a two week period with all the shows being held in the evenings. We arrived on a Wednesday afternoon and the festival ended that Saturday. We managed to visit 6 pavilions (Irish, Tamil, Brazilian, British Isles, Romanian, and Slovenian) that were scattered throughout the city. In addition to a show, each pavilion offered ethnic dinners and cultural exhibits.

On our last day in Winnipeg, we went to the Rainbow Stage open-air theatre in Kildonan Park to see a live performance of Legally Blonde. Kildonan Park is a really large park near the north end of Winnipeg. We left the motorhome a few hours early so that we would have time to bike downtown. We cycled along a path that followed the Red River to where the Assiniboine empties into the Red.

When we realized it was an open-air theatre, it initially caused us some concern. Jackie said that as a senior, she wasn’t very happy with the thought of getting up and down off the grass! We knew absolutely nothing about the show Legally Blonde, although we had heard of it before. As it turned out, the outdoor theatre was actually sheltered under a huge domed roof with seating for 2600 people. It was bright and open with no side walls. We did wonder what a performance would sound like in the rain!

On our way west after leaving Winnipeg we spent a couple of days in Brandon Manitoba where we camped at the Green Spot Home & Garden Centre. The most surprising thing about this garden centre isn’t that they are members of Harvest Hosts, it’s their eclectic business model. In addition to the usual plants, and trees, the Green Spot Home & Garden Centre had a small café which also sold frozen soup, and homemade fudge, an up scale (read expensive) clothing store that ships anywhere in Manitoba, outdoor furniture, indoor and outdoor water fountains, giftware, and an aviary with exotic birds, and more.

In the evening, we biked to Princess Park for their “Music in the Park” night. We spent an hour listening to two local singers, each performing with their guitar.

We toured Brandon on our e-bikes and visited the Discovery Centre which featured local art. They had some marvellous large sculptures of Caribou and other animals. Displays at the Discovery Centre focused on nature and indigenous teachings with many taxidermy exhibits of Canadian wildlife. The Discovery Centre is known for its cycling and hiking trails.

Next we head into Saskatchewan.