This is a province of big skies, of big and small lakes, of amber waves of cereal grains and bright yellow waves of canola, of drive-through wilderness and a history that endures today in its celebrations of a unique immigrant heritage.
Manitoba: easternmost of the Prairie Provinces–prairie that takes hold here and stays prairie, mostly, right through Saskatchewan until it slams into the Canadian Rockies in western Alberta.
Who holidays in Manitoba?
Other Manitobans, mostly–but also remnant-seeking grandchildren of European dreamers who helped make this country, at least one Belgian family (“Are the mosquitoes,” asked the matriarch, “this bad in the States?”) and any Yanks looking for something subtly different (accents, currency, beer brands) from neighboring North Dakota and Minnesota.
We won’t do all of it. We’ll leave the far-north polar bear country to someone with hardier stuff.
But, starting and finishing in Winnipeg, we’ll drive a loop around the province’s bottom third that’s sure to find surprises–because, let’s face it, how many of us know anything about this place?
That’s about to change. Here we go.
Day 1: Winnipeg to Winkler
Winnipeg, where the Red River meets the Assiniboine, can trace itself back at least 6,000 years as a meeting and trading place.
Present population: about 670,000.
Today, in the shadow of modernity, the joining of the rivers is The Forks: parkland, entertainment venues and a marketplace-food court that feels a little like Navy Pier without the Ferris wheel. It’s at least as popular with the locals as with visitors.
“That’s what we do,” explains a young lady spooning raspberry gelato. “We hang at The Forks.”
The rest of Winnipeg is, on the whole, a good city, with the obligatory museums (art, children’s, etc.), nice green space (especially Assiniboine Park) and an ethnic diversity that’s expressed in cultural centers (lots) and restaurants (varied).
It’s not without its problems. Downtown’s northern blocks are a blight. The city’s per capita murder rate is annually among Canada’s highest. It leads North America in per capita consumption of Slurpees.
On the other hand, downtown’s historic Exchange District, with massive structures built during the city’s pre-World War I boom, is enjoying a tentative mixed-use renaissance. And a short walk from all that mass, amid funky clubs and edgy theaters, is a very inviting-looking pub called the King’s Head–but it’s too early in the day to accept the invitation.
Across the Red River via the Esplanade Riel, a very cool year-old footbridge, is St-Boniface Cathedral, which is really two St-Bonifaces. The first, the grand classic-style cathedral, burned in 1968. They left some of the walls, including the facade, and built the modern St-Boniface inside. It’s all stunning.
The Trans-Canada Highway–Canada 1–motors into the heart of Winnipeg, eases through neighborhoods, by shopping malls and past Winnipeg’s branch of the Royal Canadian Mint before turning into an expressway.
We’re heading south, more or less, toward Steinbach.
The Mennonite Heritage Village is here. This branch of Mennonites, rooted in the Netherlands and with links to Prussia, settled in Ukraine long enough to pick up borscht recipes before resettling in Canada during the 1870s.
The “village” is mostly newer construction, though some of the buildings relocated here (including an 1876 sod-roof log cabin) go back to the beginning.
But where are the horses and buggies? Quick answer: Amish historically are Mennonites, but not all Mennonites are Amish.
Back on the road–and into St-Pierre-Jolys, which has banners all along the main drag touting, bilingually, the Frog Follies/Folies Grenouillies.
“They make real frogs jump,” explains businessman Don Forest.
It began 37 years ago, when two local politicians made a wager. One subsequently was disqualified for being intoxicated–the frog, not the politician.
“Last year,” Frost says, “the guy who took first won over three grand.”
We pass St. Malo Provincial Park, which has a reservoir and two swimming beaches, then a buffalo ranch–and then, just 5 miles north of the North Dakota border, there is Tolstoi.
Once there were some shops and other businesses, but now there’s just a small grocery, Steve’s Welding and, across from the Ukrainian community center, Elsie’s Tolstoi Hotel. Elsie Kolodzinski doesn’t rent rooms here anymore, but the bar is still active, and so, at 84, is Elsie.
“I’ve been here 64 years,” she says. “A lot of time in one place.” Before that, she was in Chicago. Roosevelt High School.
A few miles away, along a gravel road: Tall-Grass Prairie Preserve, “the last large block of tall-grass prairie in Canada” in a region that not long ago was almost all tall-grass prairie.
Near the prairie is a church.
St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church is the denomination’s oldest in Canada. It was completed by settlers in 1899, and it looks like the Old Country.
There are other onion-domed churches throughout Manitoba, but this one is a little startling. The people who built it, according to the sign, came to the New World from a region called Bukowyna.
So, though very likely from a very different Bukowyna neighborhood, did some of mine.
Day 2: Winkler to Brandon
It is late morning at the Pembina Threshermen’s Museum outside Winkler. Stephanie Walkof, an education major at Winnipeg University, works the office and the gift shop, sells tickets and leads tours.
There is no one else here.
“The tour takes about 1 1/2 hours,” she says.
“What if someone else comes while we’re on the tour?”
“To tell you the truth,” she says, “that hasn’t happened yet.”
She’s been working here more than a month.
Unlike the Mennonite Village, which is largely reproductions, this village of pioneer-era houses and public buildings is almost entirely genuine.
I do have a question:
“What is a thresherman?”
“It’s a person who does threshing,” she says. “Do you know what a thresher does? Probably not.”
I smile. She explains the process. Something about separating the kernels from the rest. Stephanie Walkof will be a very good teacher.
At Morden, just north of the Morden Curling Club, is the arena that’s home to the Morden Hawks Hockey Club and the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame.
In the basement is the Morden Museum. In the museum: a virtually intact Hainosaurus pembinensis.
Says Chris Bataluk, who works here: “We like to go with `Bruce.'”
“Bruce” is a tylosaur, a 43-foot-long prehistoric lizard dug up 30 years ago on a farm not far from here. Impressive lizard.
The road out of Morden is surrounded mostly by the wheat fields of the Pembina River Valley. It carries us into Swan Lake First Nation–a “reservation,” in U.S.-speak. I crave a cultural exchange; at the gas station/cafe, I find only a vague discomfort and a mediocre cheeseburger.
The highway crosses the Assiniboine River, and just ahead of Austin, there’s a sign: the Manitoba Agricultural Museum.
The museum features a Homesteaders Village–more old and faux-old buildings–but the pride of the place is truly old farm machinery, most of which I can’t identify without help.
Ahead are potato fields, which eventually give way to Spruce Woods Provincial Park, known mostly as home of Spirit Sands. These are dunes, big ones, expansive ones. If you haven’t experienced dunes like these, they are starkly beautiful, especially early and late in the day when the shadows are deep.
And as the evening shadows deepen, northwest of here, in Brandon–“Wheat City”–the local Gladiators are sharpening their skates for that night’s finals of a hockey tournament.
It is July.
Day 3: Brandon to Dauphin
The Brandon airport isn’t much more than a field with a tower. But from 1939 through the end of World War II, this was part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan–a place where young men learned to fly Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires and other airborne weapons designed to beat the Germans.
Allen Larmer was a boy in Oshawa, Ontario–another training site–during World War II. Now, he is visiting here, and it all comes back.
“[The pilots] lived on the edge,” he remembers. “But I never saw one crash. I know a few went down, in the farmers’ fields . . .”
The farmers’ fields in Manitoba stay nearly flat north of Brandon and east to Neepawa. Neepawa is a Lily Town. By chance, on this day the World Lily Capital is holding its Lily Festival.
In a tent filled with an astounding variety of lilies, the Manitoba Regional Lily Society is honoring its winners. More lilies blossom all over town, drawing busloads.
“We’re proud of this endeavor,” says a man in the Society tent.
Manitoba Highway 5 northbound from Neepawa is a line that splits the land: east of the road it’s flat; west, it’s hills. Riding Mountain National Park is west.
The road that begins at the park’s West Gate is gravel. There are some marked trailheads. I try one, called Arrowhead. I get about 30 yards into it before swarms of buzzing black flies and companion mosquitoes chase me back to the car.
“We had a very wet May and June,” explains Linda Thomas, a guide at Riding Mountain.
At Clear Lake, which has the park’s most popular swimming beach, bathers have to contend with something called The Itch, an annoyance generated by–you don’t want to know.
Want more?
“We have the world record black bear, captured and released,” says Danny Schmidtke, another park guide. “Well over 900 pounds.”
And the black bears also come in red, white, brown and blue.
“We’re not quite sure why,” says Schmidtke.
I see none of any color. No moose cross at the moose crossings. But other roads lead to small lakes that are quiet, and if Riding Mountain mountains aren’t Banff-Jasper mountains, they are a change from Manitoba Flat.
Just a few minutes away: a Ukrainian town.
Day 4: Dauphin to Gimli
There are three Ukrainian churches in Dauphin and a bilingual school. Selo Ukraina, home of Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival, is just north of town, and at Selo Ukraina is yet another “heritage village.” The gate is closed, but I find a way inside. Empty of distractions, it feels at once genuine and ghostly, with its own onion-dome church and old houses and shops.
What’s missing in Ukrainian Dauphin: a Ukrainian restaurant.
“There was one,” says motel clerk, “but they closed it down, because nobody went.” One restaurant offers a “Ukrainian platter,” but it’s on the bottom of the menu, below the chicken fingers.
Driving east from Dauphin, the land–surprise–is flat. Barley, canola and cattle. The “Cattle Capital of Manitoba”–the town of Ste-Rose-du-Lac–is nearly as ghostly as the Selo Ukraina village but without the atmosphere.
A two-lane bridge carries us over The Narrows, the water passage that links the north and south sections of Lake Manitoba. It is said pounding surf near here inspired natives to call this place something that sounded like “Manitoba” (from “manitou,” meaning “spirit”), but on this day nothing pounds.
Across the bridge are major wetlands, then Voger, listed as a town but just a shuttered convenience store. About 25 miles farther is Eriksdale, where trees, grass and flowers have been planted on the abandoned rail right of way that once defined Railway Avenue, the main drag. With so many little prairie towns looking so forlorn, Eriksdale’s optimism is refreshing.
The goal is the Narcisse Snake Dens.
It is touted as “home to tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes” that emerge from their winter quarters each spring to do whatever it is emerging red-sided garter snakes do.
So I start off on the trail, and there’s an interpretive sign: “As each female emerges she is pursued by several males who wrap themselves around her, forming a mass called a `mating ball’ . . .”
Now I’m thinking I should have brought the videocam.
Not a one. Nothing. Except for black flies large enough to swallow a python whole.
The most direct road to Lake Winnipeg is gravel. Several miles into it, I see two cranes walking along the fringes of a patch of forest. I stop. They stop. They scram.
Finally, Gimli–anticipated, via research, as an Icelandic town (another bit of ethnic diversity!) that also happens to have a beach.
Not exactly.
Day 5: Gimli to Grand Beach
Never having been to Iceland, I’m not sure what I expect to see in Gimli, but I know what I don’t expect to see.
Gimli, at least in summer, looks like a California beach town.
Not that it’s a party place full of drunken rowdies flashing pierced body parts. It’s a family place, and Gimli Beach, about 47 miles north of the capital on Lake Winnipeg–aside from piles of dead fish-flies, a seasonal scourge (late July in Manitoba evidently is Scourge Season)–is nice.
But what I thought would be an old-style, rustic, Scandinavian-looking fishing town turns out to be a contemporary yacht magnet with hardly a hint of the real Reykjavik. (There is, of course, a Manitoba Reykjavik, near The Narrows. I’d skipped it. “There’s nothing there,” I was reassured later.)
The real hints, you eventually discover, are primarily in people’s names–names like Tammy Axelsson, executive director of the town’s New Iceland Heritage Museum. There are others, she insists.
There are those huldufolk in the attic in the 1915 school building.
Huldufolk?
“Little hidden people from Iceland,” she says. “They came over with the settlers, and now they live in the attic of the old school. You can go up the spiral staircase and you might hear them.”
She is absolutely serious.
There’s her museum. “You can taste Icedlandic foods here at a tea room, Amma’s, which is the Icelandic word for `grandmother.’ “
There’s a Viking statue now, over by the yachts. There is Islendingadagurinn, the annual mid-summer festival.
And about 40 miles north, in Hecla-Grindstone Provincial Park–not far beyond Grassy Narrows Marsh–is something approaching our Icelandic fishing village. It’s more a museum than a functioning town, but it’s good that it’s there.
Doubling back through Gimli and a few miles south of Gimli: The town of Winnipeg Beach.
Nice beach, like Gimli’s. Lots of park behind the sand, for picnics and tossing things, and behind the park a Main Street that looks like it hasn’t changed anything since the 1950s.
There used to be a roller coaster here, and a glorious dance pavilion. On warm summer nights, they would come here from Winnipeg by the thousands.
Gone. Except for echoes of thrill-ride screams and saxophones.
I like Winnipeg Beach.
The beach feel vanishes quickly as Manitoba Highway 9 heads south. Again, it’s fields of wheat and canola. Then there is a crude sign offering “saskatoons” for sale –and another.
Saskatoons?
“It’s a berry native to the prairie provinces,” says John Ritz, whose folks own the farm, called Prairie Lane. “Once you’ve had saskatoon pie,” says a family friend, Bob Wiebe, “there is no other kind.”
Ritz plucks a couple off a bush and hands them over.
I want a pie.
The route straddles the bottom of Lake Winnipeg, then heads north. The destination is the east side, the other side of the lake.
The lifeguards at Winnipeg Beach had warned me: It is different on the other side.
They’re right.
Day 6: Grand Beach to Winnipeg
Ben Hutsebaut has been making the 54-mile trip to Grand Beach from Winnipeg for 52 years. He’s here with his wife and son-in-law and some grandkids who are building castles.
It is a weekday, and the sand–wider and finer than the sand across the lake–is uncrowded but nicely populated with families who look just like the ones at Gimli.
That’s not how it always is.
“You come here on a weekend,” he says, “and it’s solid. You get 50,000 from the city. Teenagers hang down at that end, families at this end.”
There used to be a train just to haul folks here from Winnipeg. There was a dance pavilion here, too, but it burned down in 1950. The last train left in 1961.
The water is warm, mainly because it’s so shallow. Waders walk forever.
“You won’t be able to swim in it in August,” says Blake Cockrell, the son-in-law. “It gets green algae. If there’s no wind, the water just lies there.”
Another Scourge.
Back on the road.
This Ethnic Manitoba Tour, such as it is, still has a gap.
The Wolf’s Den Cafe is in the same building as Sagkeeng First Nation’s hockey arena. The daily special is Salisbury steak, but here it is offered with bannock, a traditional native bread.
I don’t feel the chill here I felt at Swan Lake. The waitress is cordial and welcoming, and I ask if I can talk with her about things on the reservation.
“It’s always good to talk to the elders,” she says. She turns to look toward a woman sitting alone by the window. “How about her?”
Juliana Courchene was a teacher. She is a traditionalist, and traditionalists among her people, the Ojibway –in her language, the Anishinabe–are dying out.
“The belief of the traditionalist,” she says, “is that until you have your language, who are you? Your identity is lost. That’s how we see our children.”
But the schools, they’re teaching the language . . .
“They’ve been doing it for 30 years, and the kids are still not learning the language,” she says. “They don’t have anybody at home to converse with. The young parents don’t teach the language either . . .”
We talk of other things. We could have talked for hours–but there is one more provincial park I must see.
Glenda Schutz is an attendant at Whiteshell Provincial Park. As we talk, really big flies swarm around us.
“What are they?”
“People have different names for them,” she says. “They’re just a really big fly.”
She offers suggestions.
“It’s a very winding road,” she says, “but you’re guaranteed–there’s a mosquito on your cheek–you’re guaranteed to see lots of nature.”
“Do the flies bite?”
“They bite when you’re wet,” she says. On cue, it starts to rain.
The road connects lakes and the cottages that surround them. On the Whiteshell River, boys leap through a cascade called Rainbow Falls.
Driving on, I see a deer dart for cover, and Glenda Schutz has retained her credibility. Half an hour later, well out of the park, a black bear, black this time, leisurely crosses the road . . .
The King’s Head, and Winnipeg, seem a world away from the wheat and canola and the beaches and threshermen and Juliana Courchene and the bear. But here among the dart boards, Stu McConnell looks very much at home over a pint.
“They call Winnipeg `Little Chicago,’ eh?” says McConnell, who has some kind of city job. “Al Capone used to come here.”
It’s more than familiarity with crime bosses and the odd murder. Winnipeg is stacker of wheat and player with railroads, an ethnic mosaic, a town that means business.
Winters are cold here, and summers are hot.
We both have mosquitoes.
But how do you explain Winnipeg being the Slurpee Capital?
“You don’t,” said McConnell. “We also have more magicians per capita than any other city in North America.
“I know a lot of magicians. There’s tons of them . . . “
And with that, we each make the evening’s first pint disappear.
———-
E-mail: asolomon@tribune.com
– – –
NOTES FROM THE ROAD
Highlights: St-Boniface Cathedral, Esplanade Riel and Osborne Village-Little Italy neighborhoods (all Winnipeg); Tall-Grass Prairie Preserve (near Tolstoi), wheat fields, St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Gardenton), lil-ies, grain elevators, Pembina Threshermen’s Museum, marshes, Spirit Sands Trail (Spruce Woods Provincial Park), “heritage villages,” flax fields, Riding Mountain National Park, bears, Lake Winnipeg beaches and canola fields.
Road food: Farmer sausage, poutine (fries with brown gravy and dots of mozzarella cheese), cabbage soup, kielkse (noodles and cream gravy), vereniki (pierogi variation), lasagna, perogies (local spelling), buffalo, chicken fingers, saskatoons, barbecue back ribs, bannock, ice cream, veal cutlets and brown gravy, pickerel, pickerel cheeks, gold-eye (a fish, usually smoked), Icelandic brown bread, Salisbury steak, Slurpees, fettucine alfredo and doughnuts.
Best room: Ft. Garry Hotel, Winnipeg; $114.71 (all prices U.S.).
Best lunch: Cabbage borscht (soup), farmer sausage and three vereniki with cream gravy, $6.98; Livery Barn Restaurant (Mennonite Heritage Village), Steinbach.
Best dinner: Fiore di zucchini con pancetta e rocotta con salza di pomodori (zucchini blossoms stuffed with Italian bacon and cheese in tomato sauce) and bistecca di bisonte con asparagi alla griglia e fromaggio de capra (buffalo steak with grilled asparagus and goat cheese), $37.05; Amici, Winnipeg.
Most creative restaurant combo: Del Rios, Winkler. It’s Mexican-Mennonite.
Most famous major leaguer honored at the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame: The Twins’ Corey Koskie, from Anola. You’ve never heard of the other one.
Best souvenir: A mosquito plush toy, $6.20; Hecla General Store, Hecla. Press its belly, and it buzzes.
Best attic: A huge building filled with stuff–including 1906-10 Manitoba license plates made of buffalo skin, a Linotype machine and at least a dozen cream separators; Pembina Threshermen’s Museum, Winkler.
Prettiest fields: Canola.
Worst Manitoba plague: Mosquitoes, black flies, fish-flies and The Itch (tie).
Best friend: Deet.
Scariest billboard: One that invites golfers to play the World’s Longest Par 6–751 yards–at La Verendrye Golf Course, La Broquerie.
Best beach: Grand Beach.
Best hike: Spirit Sands Trail (into the dunes), Spruce Woods Provincial Park.
Best reason to stop whining: Winnipeg prices for a gallon of regular averaged about $3/gallon.
Best clue it’s not always 82 degrees in Manitoba: Plug-ins for block heaters, so cars will start the next morning, at most motels.
Road best taken: Manitoba Highway 10 through Riding Mountain National Park.
–Alan Solomon
– – –
MANITOBA ROUTE
DAY 1
Winnipeg-Winkler: 157 miles
The route: Canada Highway 1 east to Manitoba Highway 12, then south to Steinbach; from Steinbach, Manitoba 52 west to Manitoba 59, and south to Tolstoi; back north on 59 to Manitoba 201, west to Manitoba 75, north to Manitoba 14 and west to Winkler.
Overnight: Heartland Resort, Winkler; $70.25 (U.S.).
Best grub: Komst borscht (a Ukrainian/Mennonite cabbage soup), $1.87; Kopper Kettle, Morden.
DAY 2
Winkler-Brandon: 185 miles
The route: Manitoba Highways 14 and 3 west through Morden to Manitoba 34, north on Manitoba 34 to Austin, west on Canada Highway 1 to Manitoba 5, south on Manitoba 5 to Spruce Woods Provincial Park, back north on Manitoba 5 to Canada 1 and west into Brandon.
Overnight: Lakeview Inns and Suites, Brandon; $102.26
Best grub: Prime rib, $16.37; The Keg, Brandon.
DAY 3
Brandon-Dauphin: 152 miles
The route: Manitoba Highway 10 north to Canada Highway 16, east to Neepawa; Manitoba 5 north to Manitoba 19, then west on Manitoba 19 into Riding Mountain National Park to Manitoba 10; Manitoba 10 south to Wasagaming, then back north on the same road to Dauphin.
Overnight: Super 8, Dauphin; $69.52.
Best grub: Ukrainian platter (koubassa [sausage] and sauerkraut, plus cabbage rolls and potato-stuffed perogies), $7.01; Old Fashion restaurant, Dauphin.
DAY 4
Dauphin-Gimli: 191 miles
The route: Manitoba Highway 5 east to Ste Rose du Lac, continuing east on Manitoba 68 to Poplarfield; Manitoba 17 south to Manitoba 231 (a gravel road for the first 16 miles) and east into Gimli.
Overnight: Autumnwood Motel, Gimli; $80.03.
Best grub: Pickerel dinner, $6.17; Beach Boy Restaurant, Gimli.
DAY 5
Gimli-Hecla-Grand Beach: 193 miles
The route: Manitoba Highways 222 and 8 north to Hecla, then backtracking on Manitoba 8 and on to Manitoba 9 to Winnipeg Beach; Manitoba 9, 4 and 59 around Lake Winnipeg to Manitoba 12 and Grand Beach.
Overnight: Birchwood Hotel, Traverse Bay; $61.35.
Best grub: Icelandic sampler plate (half a rullapulsa [spiced lamb] sandwich on Icelandic brown bread, plus pannokukur [a crepe], skyr [a yogurt] and vinerterta [a cake]), $5.45; Amma’s Tea Room, Gimli.
DAY 6
Grand Beach-Winnipeg: 195 miles
The route: Manitoba Highway 12 to Manitoba 59and north to Manitoba 11 south; Manitoba 11 to Manitoba 307 through Whiteshell Provincial Park to Manitoba 44, west to Manitoba 59 and south (eventually via city streets) into Winnipeg.
Overnight: Ft. Kerry Hotel, Winnipeg; $114.71.
Best grub: Bistecca di bisonte con asparagi alla griglia e fromaggio de capra (buffalo steak with grilled asparagus and goat cheese), $29.64; Amici, Winnipeg.
Total miles: 1,073
Miles are actual miles driven but typically include meanderings. Lodgings are listed as a guide to prices and not necessarily as recommendations. Room prices are for one person, tax included; doubles usually slightly higher. All prices are in U.S. dollars and are subject to change and exchange-rate fluctuations.
–A.S.
