We got up (thus allowing Mike to come down from the bedroom - sometimes we feel a little self conscious about our odd musician schedule, but he was a very good sport). We had another little visit, said our thank you and goodbyes and then went out to have breakfast and do a little sightseeing.
We drove into downtown on Portage Avenue, so the first "sight" to see was the famous Portage and Main intersection, where the "crosswalks" are now tunnels dug under the street, since it gets so cold and windy there that people actually froze to death. "Portage and Main, 50 below," indeed!
I had planned to go first to the Forks Market and get breakfast, but I missed the turnoff, which drove us past the "restaurant with the $1,000,000 bathroom" - they built a bridge across the river, put a restaurant on it, and it cost a million dollars to plumb it. (That's the verb for plumbing, right?) and right into Old St Boniface (Winnipeg's French Quarter).
We found a cute cafe for breakfast - Adam is still singing the praises of the rye bread there, and then back to the famous Cathedral. All the times I went to Winnipeg to work, I intended to go to St Boniface Cathedral, but never actually did. So this time, I was determined to check it out. I was very glad I did. St Boniface Cathedral had been around for a long time in various incarnations, but when the fourth version caught fire and was largely destroyed in 1968, they built a new, modern cathedral inside the ruins of the old one. It's really beautiful. There is (of course) an attached cemetery, and it includes a plaque memorializing the hundreds of people that are buried there without any stones or other memorials. Apparently there are over 6000 people buried there - and nowhere near that amount of space or number of gravestones. We also saw Louis Riel's grave and the controversial Louis Riel Sculpture that used to stand (in a concrete tube so it couldn't be seen from the front doors) in front of the legislative buildings.
Then we went back across the bridge (and caught the turnoff) to the Forks Market. I showed Adam the high water mark of the 1998 flood (the one I was in Winnipeg for) and we found a star bowl and went partway across the bridge where you can actually see the "forks" of the river (Red and Assiniboine). It was awesome!
We walked from there to the train station (where I actually took the train back to Edmonton from Winnipeg at least once) and looked at the renovated main area - I had remembered a slightly more intricate decor, but they've done a beautiful job of the restoration.
Back to the car, and we drove past the Legislative Buildings (planned to stop, but couldn't find parking - oops!) and then down Osborne Street through Osborne Village (the Commercial Drive or Whyte Ave of Winnipeg) and I was able to point out the bar where I had the most delicious dessert martini of my life (the chocolate martini with Godiva liqueur and a Hershey's kiss as garnish). Then, onto the highway.
We decided to take it pretty easy and only go as far as Brandon, where we arrived at around 4:30pm, just in time for a delicious "lupper" (I intend to bring in this term, like "brunch" for a meal sort of between lunch and supper.) at The Docks on Princess in downtown Brandon. This restaurant/pub has a mission to give us the "taste of Manitoba," serving locally sourced food. I had a pulled pork sandwich made with locally farmed pork and a delicious pretzel bun made by a Brandon bakery, and Adam had a beer braised beef sandwich and a beer from the "Farmery" in Neepawa MB (birthplace of Canadian author Margaret Laurence) where they describe the beer as "grown" instead of "brewed" - they grow all of the ingredients for the beer at the "farmery" and Adam said it was delicious! (I opted for one of my favourite non-local beers, Kronenbourg Blanc, which they'd just started carrying - I was even able to tell our server about the pretty blue bottle it comes in if you don't get it on tap).
We had hesitated over all our usual hotel booking websites, since the motels/hotels in our price range hadn't gotten very good reviews, and a search of the area suggested that there were several small motels that didn't have an online presence, so we decided to take our chances. Which turned out to be a great idea, since we found a nice, updated motel that was inexpensive, had some free wifi (although not consistent enough to post this!) and gave us a chance to do laundry and relax for the night.
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