Day 8: via a Little Town On The Prairie to the Lake Of The Woods

River valley in Saskatchewan

We witnessed an incident during our breakfast on 11th Street in Regina when a young aboriginal man walked in and started to help himself to the buffet. The house manager intervened, saying he was calling the police, but the miscreant was so hungry he wouldn't budge, telling everyone it was his country too, and that he'd had a terrible day yesterday as well as a terrible night, which I'm sure was true. Chris and I felt sorry for him and offered to pay for his meal; when the youth shuffled off with a pile of toast and coffee in a polystyrene mug, the hotel manager didn't charge it to our room, just shrugged his shoulders and told us this happens all the time. It's sad that the city centres in the midwest of Canada seem to belong to these dropout natives who give their compatriots such a bad reputation. Probably this is why regeneration of the downtown is not easy. I don't think that turning the elegant old CN train station into a Casino can help much, either.

It was perfect flying weather today, cooler at altitude than on the ground, with small cumulus, though this did begin to grow into towering cumuli over some river valleys with steep sides and flooded oxbow lakes. Then the clouds thinned out again.

Erickson: the road to the airport (PTN on the left)

The Viking ship at Erickson

We've had enough of flying west so have turned eastward and this morning's two hours in the air took us back into Manitoba, to an utterly peaceful little town or village called Erickson (settled by Vikings, to judge by the road signs) situated half way between Brandon and Dauphin, in the rolling fields. The runway cut through the middle of a hayfield. The airport building was a hut with lilies in bloom by the doorsteps, that was originally used as a one room schoolhouse, one of the last such schoolhouses to be built in all of Canada. Erickson's other claim to fame is that it's the highest town in Manitoba, at over 2000ft asl. We were greeted by a gentlemanly, softly spoken, distinctly Scandinavian looking person, and when we walked into town for lunch came across some others of his kind. The blonde waitress at the Nordic Inn greeted an elderly customer as Miss Something, asking her politely how she was. I'd lay a bet that she was once the schoolmistress in the one room hut. In the park by Otter Lake was a carved Viking ship with flowers round its prow and a sign by a disused railway track with the rails gone to say this is now part of the Trans-Canada Trail.

Leaving Erickson

Edge of Lake Manitoba

Red River, north of Winnipeg

I can imagine living here. I wouldn't mind it. We took off rather regretfully, having paid for our fuel by cheque, since there were no card readers, opening our flight plan to Kenora, just over the next provincial border in Ontario. This was another pleasing flight in fine weather all the way for two more hours, although we did see rain showers near our destination. One section was out across Lake Manitoba, crossing about 26NM of open water, a further distance than across the English Channel, we realised. But we were never more than 10 miles from the southernmost shore where the marshland is. We had a fine view of the (brown) Red River winding north of Winnipeg, too. Soon after that we were saying farewell to the prairies on the western edge of the forests. Kenora is surrounded by multitudinous lakes.

The last of the Prairie fields, near the Ontario border

Another crosswind landing!

Lake of the Woods on our approach to Kenora

Kenora airport is a long way outside town; the Shell office ordered a taxi for us to the Travelodge (motel) and the driver was a long haired native man with a large feather on the dashboard who was older and wiser than the young man stealing toast. This one spoke of the mistakes people had made when they tried to tame the flooded rivers with canals and dykes. When he was a child, he said, they'd let nature run her course and the flooded grasslands had quickly absorbed all the excess water with no harm done. If you leave nature alone, she balances things out in time. I told him I absolutely agree with that.

We walked to the main part of Kenora for an excellent Greek supper and sat on a bench by the lakeside boardwalk. Tomorrow we're staying on the ground for a rest.

Chris went to a lot of trouble to get the Internet connection working so that I could publish this post from the Travelodge. Thanks, Chris!

Day 6: reaching the prairies

Indoor view from our hotel room in Brandon

We are out of Ontario, finally, and on the prairies now, at Brandon, Manitoba, spending the night at the Victoria Inn where there's an indoor swimming pool for families right outside our sliding glass doors. When I ticked the box for a poolside room, I didn't realise what that meant. We don't have any other windows, so no view of the sky tomorrow morning.

Morning at the hotel in Fort Frances

Rainy Lake on a windy morning

Sandbags in Fort Frances, by the Rainy River

This morning was quite different, with a view of the stormy lake at 6:30am, waves breaking on the shore a few metres away. We heard the waves, and the rain coming down on Rainy Lake, last night. After breakfast in another lakeside room we used our borrowed van to drive a few km along Highway 11 as far as the causeway and long bridges, finding a harbour where a float plane was loading barrels, a typical northwoods scene! Back in town (Fort Frances) we had another walk beside Rainy River near the spot where they held the International Bass Fishing Championship "with big money prizes" this weekend. The riverside road was sandbagged. Everyone we speak to mentions the recent flooding which is also the talk of the town in Winnipeg and Brandon.

Climbing out from Fort Frances

Our first flight today was from Fort Frances to Winnipeg. (Chris dictating ... "We needed to get our flight clearance from Minneapolis Centre but couldn't contact them on the ground. Cloud base appeared to be about 2500' so we took off VFR and got our clearance in the air. We were in or above cloud all the way until very close to Winnipeg. For about 80 miles in the middle of the journey we were not on radar at all. At Winnipeg, runway 36 is closed for repair and so, although the wind was from 020 at 15 gusting 20 knots, we and all othe traffic had to use rwy 31.") I'm glad it wasn't I who had to do that landing; in fact with my eyes closed for some of it I didn't give it the attention it deserved ...but did see how he landed on the right hand wheel on the centre line. "I unnecessarily flew the ILS to minimums, 200ft," he adds proudly.

Approaching Winnipeg airport

We had an interesting lunch break at Winnipeg, welcomed by a nice young man from the Shell FBO, very assiduous in looking after us, giving us a gift bag of wipes and a good quality pen when we left. It was a posh facility that doubled as the waiting room for occasional flights to Nunavut. The nice young man advised us to get something to eat at an outlet of Chicken Delight in the next door terminal, a sort of bus station for passengers flying to the First Nations reserves. It was very crowded with not very happy looking people. The airline is called Perimeter Aviation and its slogan says: We Put First Nations First. There were notices on the wall saying that passengers travelling to DRY communities would be severely punished for smuggling in liquor or drugs. The chicken delights were rather slow in coming and we carried them in paper bags back to the FBO to eat there.

Strange landscape at the southern end of Lake Manitoba

Canal emptying into Lake Manitoba

From an aeronautical point of view the flight from Winnipeg to Brandon was uneventful: at 6000' we were in and out of cloud until we descended for Brandon. Flying IFR we had to go via a waypoint called UDE on the V304 airway, so from an observational point of view this made a wonderful detour: after the colourful patchwork of flat fields, yellow, green and blue, we saw the wonderfully patterned marshland on the edge of Lake Manitoba and the flooded rivers and canals emptying into it.

Brandon and the floods

The Assiniboine River is particularly flooded.

Road in Manitoba

A grey-haired couple in a Cessna 150 approached the field at the same time as we did; we let them fly the circuit ahead of us, and both planes used the gravel strip, runway 32, rather than the wide, paved one, runway 26. Brandon Flying Club has premises rather like Rockcliffe's. We made a Facetime call to Mum from the pilots' lounge then ordered a taxi to the hotel, thinking it would be downtown, but it happened to be on the far side of Brandon, on Victoria Avenue where it crosses 34th Street. The north-south streets are mostly numbered, as we noticed when walking into town for our supper, as far as 10th Street where the Downtown Hub is, that the Brandon city councillors are desperately trying to regenerate. They've done well with the street landscaping and the flowers, adding an inevitable skateboard rink, but they need to have some places for people to live and shop in, at the Hub, otherwise everyone will disappear back to the leafy streets around the university, where it doesn't look so derelict and deserted.

Arrival at Brandon airport

Downtown Brandon

The Brandon skateboard rink