This is one flat part of the world. Here's a couple shots along Hwy 1 fifty or so miles short of Winnipeg:
Winnipeg is a large city, with over 700,000 people residing within the city limits. I had three museums I wanted to see, two of them downtown. The downtown area reminded me of Denver, with streets intersecting at odd angles and lots of tall buildings.
My first stop was the Winnipeg Railroad Museum located in (get this!) the railroad station in Winnipeg. The museum wasn't much to write home about, but I thought the station was pretty magnificent. Here's a picture of the main foyer of the station:
And here's a picture of the inside of the dome overhead...I thought it was pretty:
After taking in the railroad museum, I headed further uptown to the Manitoba Museum on Rupert Avenue. The Museum is pretty darn big, and they did have a lot of displays about prehistoric Manitoba, the lives and times of the "First Nations" people (aka Indians), and the influence the white man has had on the Province. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but here are a couple:
Manitoba must have been covered up with dinosaurs back in the day.
My final stop in Winnipeg was the Royal Aviation Museum of Canada. Apparently I'm not the first foreigner to visit:
Looks like Kate and whats-his-name were here last year.
Anyway, the museum had the typical displays of planes that airplane museums typically have:
One item that caught my eye was...a real, honest-to-goodness Flying Saucer. Yep, it's true, Vickers, the Canadian Aircraft company, built a prototype in the 1960's and actually got it to hover about 5 feet off the ground:
Not sure what use it would have actually been, but, hey...if it's good enough for ET, who knows?
That pretty well sums the day up. It was about another 60 miles due west from Winnipeg to Portage La Prairie, where I'm spending the nite. Tomorrow, it's off to the northwest a bit to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. (Never been there either!)
Miles today: 201
To Date: 2,418
