Day 13 - Riding Mountain National Park

We left Boggy Creek about 10:30 on Saturday morning destined for Wasagaming, Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park. It was a 2 hour drive from Sandee’s Place. I had spent many a summer camping there with my family as a child when we still lived in Manitoba and had some great memories. I remember going for the May long weekend and waking up the last morning and there was a foot of snow on everything. Did I mention that we didn’t RV back then but had a big CANVAS TENT? It was no easy thing to fold a snow covered frozen tent to put in the trunk of a car! (insert by my older children here - “We know - uphill, barefoot, in the snow, both ways, on your Dinosaur with it’s 8-track”)! 
We arrived sometime after 1:00 pm after getting diesel in Roblin and stopping along the way to shoot photo’s of grain elevators, “Gilbert” - a hockey playing golf ball -  the mascot of Gilbert Plains, MB. and a Moose grazing along the side of the road. (Photo’s to follow when we have stable wifi - keep checking back!). Here they are:

 

We checked in on our reservation at the campsite (made the day before from Boggy Creek - yes B.C’ians - they still had a few spots available the day before on a long weekend!) then went into Wasagaming. I’m not sure if it’s normally easy to get a site here at the drop of a hat - it could have something to do with the torrential rain the Prairies have been getting these last few weeks - it seems to have followed us all the way from Banff. We have seen flooding and a lot of mud all the way here - very, very bad in some places. Many of the campsites here were flooded - about a foot underwater some of them! We had a fairly dry site - just some large puddles.

We spent the afternoon walking around town - checking out the stores, the Visitors Centre, and one of the three museums here - mostly in the rain but being hardy BC’ians we had rain gear as opposed the most of the other people - running around in flip-flops and hoodies SOAKING WET!!! We came back and cooked a Lasagna for dinner and spent the evening watching TV as by now it was no longer raining but torrentially down pouring again. We chose to stay indoors instead of going to the evening “Campfire” at 8:00pm - a talk about “Bear Safety” given by one of the Park Rangers. I felt we were pretty safe inside the RV - even if there were any bears crazy enough to go out in the deluge! Tomorrow we hope to go over to Lake Audy - the park has a Bison Refuge Enclosure there that you can drive through - hopefully the rain will have stopped or at least slowed down enough for us to see some real live Buffalo.