Wasagaming and Clear Lake
2011/09/25
Today was a mini-vacation – a break from driving, at one of my favorite places, Riding Mountain National Park – specifically the town of Wasagaming, which is on Clear Lake.
Had breakfast at the aforementioned restaurant that turned me off milk for two years – decided to give them a second change, decades later – and it was not bad. I didn’t have any milk though.
After that, I went and walked around the campground for a bit. We used to camp here frequently in our Manitoba days. I don’t have many specific memories of it, but still a general feeling of happy nostalgia washed over me while I was walking around. Plus it’s beautiful. Here’s what a typical campsite looks like:
Lots of room, a picnic table and fireplace, and enough trees between sites to give a bit of privacy. The sites are all open at both ends onto roads that look like these:
If you’re camping here, the preferred way to get around and go into town is by bicycle, but it’s an easy walk too.
I walked around town a bit. Here’s the old firehall:
And I went back to the favorite ice cream parlour and bought the favorite ice cream – two scoops on a double cone:
As a kid I was amazed by these weird mutant double-headed ice cream cones, and wondered how they made them. Seldom saw them anywhere else so I still associate them with Riding Mountain.
By accident I discovered an old memory. This purple martin birdhouse:
inspired me as a child – I wanted to make birdhouses all fancy like that. When we got back to the farm I did build some birdhouses, some of them multi-story, but they didn’t turn out quite as fancy as this. :)
My main mission for to day was to sit around near the beach contemplating my cross-Canada road trip, what it means to me, and what I want out of life.
To that end, I spent some time lying down on a picnic table, watching the breeze rustle the leaves on these trees:
Which is a really relaxing thing to do – I can’t recommend staring up at trees enough. Might want to wear glasses though to keep falling things out of your eyes.
I also went out onto the jetty next to the beach, and sat here for a while, thinking:
Watching the wind raise ripples in the water, and the jetty shape interference patterns in the ripples, was also relaxing.
I was finally starting to get into this whole thinking thing seriously when a hornet crawled up my shirt and bit me on the chest. OUCH! I haven’t been bitten by a mandibled insect since I was a kid and I forgot how much it hurt. I rushed back to my room to disinfect it and see if there was a stinger present – no, but it swelled up a fair bit. By the end of the afternoon the swelling was gone but the bite still stung.
That kind of interrupted my chain of thought. I went and sat near the beach again, but kept getting interrupted by more bugs crawling on me, so eventually I gave up on trying to get any serious thinking done today.
Still, it was a nice day off from driving and I definitely did get some good relaxing in. From here it’s the home stretch back to Vancouver, with a brief stopover in Calgary, and then my road trip will be done.
More fall color photos:
At the end of the day, I went back out to get some sunset photos – nothing spectacular due to lack of clouds, but it was nice.
[gmap file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/09/20110925.kml” visible=”true” type=”satellite” center=”files” zoom=”auto”]
