When we arrived at East Grand Forks, MN we toyed with the idea of driving Betsy north into Manitoba, Canada.  After some research and discussion we decided instead to take a road trip by car the 140 miles to Winnipeg.  We’ve managed to visit a Canadian province at least once every summer since we began our life on the road, and we didn’t want this year to be an exception.  So off we went, and as we waited in line at the border we realized this was our 10th time passing into Canada.

We breezed across the border after being asked the usual questions: “Are you bringing alcohol or tobacco with you?  Do you have any firearms with you?  Are you visiting anybody in Winnipeg?”  An hour and a half later we arrived at our hotel and quickly headed out to do some exploring.

While looking around we noticed a common term, Forks – the hotel, the street it was on, the market, the railway road and the historic site all had the word Forks in their name.  I initially thought a Mr. Forks must have discovered or developed this place, but my guess was quickly corrected as we meandered around the area to the nearby river.

Historically,  the Forks was the meeting place of great significance for First Nations and Metis people.  The area is so named because it is where the Assiniboine River flows into the Red River, and there is a rich history of early Aboriginal settlement, fur trade, the advent of the railway, waves of immigration and the Industrial Age. Winnipeg was built around both rivers.

Today, framed by the banks of the two rivers, The Forks has been Winnipeg’s number one meeting place for the past 6,000 years.  We walked around the forks and saw an array of attractions for everyone including parks, promenades, gardens and sculptures intermingled with many shops and restaurants.  We also discovered that our hotel, The Inn at the Forks, was located on a historical site.  Here are just a few of the photos I took in and around the Forks:

Home-made dill pickles, one of Steve’s favorite snacks

Are you up for some shopping?

Manitoba Theatre for Young People

A collection of cool blue flags with images of people’s faces on them were displayed at the broadway promenade by the riverwalk.   A closer look revealed it’s one of the summer’s Cool Gardens public exhibitions of contemporary art.  The collection of 2,015 flags demonstrates the diversity and unity that thrives in this city.

The following morning I set my sights on the recently opened (Sept. 2014) Canadian Museum for Human Rights, built right at the Forks and an easy walk from our hotel.  I missed the guided tour but was content to discover the museum’s exhibitions, architecture and human rights stories at my own pace.

The galleries are built around human rights themes with special but not exclusive reference to Canada.  The displays interweave human rights stories of many diverse groups throughout the building’s seven levels.

One of the niches was the Redress Project.  It brings awareness of the overwhelming number of missing and/or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada.

While I was busy reading and experiencing different levels of emotion, I was also captivated by the architecture inside the building.

While I was at the museum, Steve was doing some discovering of his own at the only museum in Winnipeg dedicated to the preservation of Manitoba’s railway heritage.

He’s been to several train museums, but this one excelled in it’s displays of equipment used to install and maintain tracks.  It also had great stories about the incredibly tough conditions people endured to get tracks installed across hundreds of miles of permafrost in barren areas of Canada.

The two of us met later at the Forks Market to join a guided trolley tour around the city. We learned a lot during the next 90 minutes.  At one time Winnepeg was Canada’s 3rd largest city, but it lost that distinction to Vancouver after the building of the Panama Canal, which altered the transportation landscape here forever.  We saw the childhood home of Neil Young and heard stories about Bob Dylan and Homer Simpson visiting the city.  As usual, after the tour we used the map they provided to continue on our own sightseeing adventure.

The city has hundreds of murals depicting the unique history and culture of Winnipeg. The spectacular mural below (only part of which is visible here) measures 16,000 square ft. and is a continuous piece of art wrapped around three sides of the building.  It’s the largest independent mural in Canada, and its theme is Music and Railroads – a celebration of the city’s cultural and economic history.

Below, Jill Sellers’ conceptual rendering of the proposed “Nyg�rd Village” measures 50 ft. high and 92 ft. wide, making it the second largest mural in Winnipeg. 

It was a whirlwind excursion and we packed a lot into our two-day trip, and we obviously just got a taste of Winnipeg.  We wished we had a few days more to explore.

And that’s the first half of my Tale of Two Forks, the Canadian side of the Red River, the second half will be the southern part of the Red River back in the U.S.A.