(Message sent Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:31:36 -0700)
Hi everyone. The four of us took a road trip yesterday to go and see Lake Winnipeg, 14th biggest lake in the world. We chose to visit the lake at a town called Gimli, mostly because I couldn't resist visiting a town with a name like that. No, it's not named after a certain well-loved Dwarf, although the reality is scarcely less strange. In 1875 1,000 people emigrated from Iceland to found the town. "Gimli" means "Home of the Gods" in Icelandic. The sign at the lakefront explaining all this is in English, French - and Icelandic.
In the early 90s the locals erected a giant Viking warrior to celebrate their Norse heritage. Jon immediately dubbed him Sven. He's at N 50 37.787 W 096 59.208.
I was surprised to find that the lake itself is brown. I guess I was expecting blue. When we first arrived I could just make out land over the lake to the east, and figured that that must be the far shore. But once I got to a spot with a wider view of the horizon it immediately became apparent that the land I had seen must have been an island - the far shore was nowhere to be seen.
While standing on the town's breakwater I watched an RCMP zodiac leave the little marina. The RCMP are better known to us as the Mounties, and I got a laugh out of the fact that the Mounties have an aquatic division.
After leaving Gimli we traveled through the flat, flat, flat landscape to watch some snakes make out. The Narcisse Snake Dens (N 50 43.936 W 097 31.742) consist of four pits connected by a well-maintained network of paths in which red-sided garter snakes gather to mate in a rather peculiar way at certain times of the year. Basically individual female snakes get mobbed by dozens of males, and they form a "mating ball", which looks exactly like you are imagining right now - a squirming, seething, writhing mass of snakes.
The first den we got to had two mating balls doing their thing, each consisting of maybe a dozen snakes. There were also a couple of loners, traveling between the mating balls or setting off in search of a better party elsewhere.
We were too late in the season to see them at their most... um... active, when hundreds rather than dozens gather, but still it was a very strange sight.
There wasn't much going on in the second den. There was a mating ball, but all the composite snakes were dead, and had blackened in the sun and were smelling quite ripe. Man, that must have been some lovers' tiff.
Unfortunately we were running out of time, and so didn't make it to the other two dens. As we passed the first one on the way back to the car we at first thought that one of the balls had done its dash and disbanded, but Victoria spotted it under some foliage. In their enthusiasm the whole roiling mass of virile snakehood had moved a metre or so.
We've also visited a couple of neat museums in Winnipeg. The Aviation Museum is pretty cool. It's basically a hanger chocker-block full of old planes and parts of planes, some of which you can clamber into. My favourite devices were the early attempt at a human-powered helicopter (which basically consisted of counter-rotating props driven by a step-machine like you see in gyms) and the Avro-car (a flying saucer-like machine that never got more than a metre off the ground).
The Manitoba Museum was pretty ordinary (stuffed-animal dioramas and the like), with two exceptions that really blew me away. The first was a locally-found fossil trilobite - that is 70cm long! I had no idea they could get so big, the only ones I had seen previously being only a few cms long. This trilobite got by by filtering morsels out of pond sediment, leaving a distinctive wavy path in the sediment as it went. They know this because the path had also been fossilized, and was part of the display.
But the real jaw-drop moment came when I turned a corner to find myself staring at a full-sized 17th century sailing ship, there in the middle of the museum, tied up against a section of dock. This is a replica of a ship called the Nonsuch that sailed to Canada in 1668. The replica itself was seaworthy, and spent sometime at sea before winding up in the museum. You are allowed to go aboard, and it is just magnificent.
The last section of the museum is a 'life in the 1920s' street scene. One of the displays was a mini-cinema, in which you could choose one of five clips to watch. When I arrived a group of school kids was laughing themselves silly at a Charlie Chaplin movie. The teacher rounded them up, and as they left one little tyke said, "Mrs Williams, could you get us a Charlie Chaplin DVD?" Interesting that, even with all the whizzy tech the kids have, the classics still have a certain appeal.
I left the museum, making for the planetarium. In the foyer I bumped into an old friend. You can read all about it here.
The planetarium show was about the IAU's decision to demote Pluto from the lofty ranks of planethood. It was structured as a criminal prosecution, with Pluto being charged with impersonating a planet for 70 years. The trial device was pretty cheesy, but the science and the history that hung off it was all sound, and in general it was a good show.
As you were leaving you got to push a button to vote Guilty or Not Guilty. The standings at the time were: Guilty (i.e. Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet): 1360; Not Guilty (i.e. it should): 2740.
In the early days of colonization forts played a big role. They were frequently built my merchants to protect some aspect of trade. I went off today to visit Fort Gibraltar, a reconstruction built in the 70s based very loosely on an actual historical Fort Gibraltar which serviced the animal pelt trade.
At first I was leery of visiting the fort, as I knew it featured actors in period dress, fearing some ghastly Disneyesque theme park. But in fact it wasn't like that at all. The fort itself was just great, and the people in period dress just moved from place to place doing their work as if it was a real living fort. In fact the recreators out-numbered the visitors by ten to one, so I actually felt very anachronistic with my camera and GPS and cheap Chinese clothing.
I've visited many, many such places in roleplaying games, and it was very cool indeed to see such a convincing recreation.
I chatted with a number of the reenactors, including one very friendly and knowledgeable chap who knew all about New Zealand. Especially the New South Wales part and the convict history and all that :-)
The fort is at N 49 53.967 W 097 07.558.
Rory has been watching Winnie-the-Pooh lately, so: TTFN!
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