A Fine Day for a Bike Ride ...

The weather was beautiful ... the sun was shining, the air was warm .. it was a fabulous autumn day !

M suggested that we go for a bike ride at Riding Mountain National Park this morning after the kids got off to school ... having nothing else planned for my day off, I said sure ... We made it, after getting the van loaded, stopping for gas and a fill of transmission fluid following an unexpected stop in the middle of the street in front of the post office when shifting from R to D resulted in NOTHING !!!

We drove to Lake Audi, waved to the Bison sitting in the grass at the south end of the compound, and continued on to the parking lot for the Central and Strathclair trails ... Today we decided to head west towards Whitewater to see if we could reach and find the old POW camp site that was there during World War Two ...

The ride was easy and lovely ... the trail (not the one in the picture - that's one from last year on the road east out of the Bison compound) was an easy pedal ... we saw more flickers then you could flick a stick at, a dozen or more grouse, lots and lots of small birds, but the highlight was stopping to listen to the crashing of a large animal somewhere off the trail. It sounded like something rubbing its antlers against branches and brush, and sure enough - we spied, about 15 metres away, a moose with a full rack of antlers heading deeper into the woods - it was AWESOME.

After an hour, we were thinking about turning around when over the next rise I saw the marker post for our destination !!!! We made it to Whitewater !!! We had pedaled the 10 kms and barely broke a sweat !!!

So, we rode into the campsite - another 100 metres, and explored a bit before lunch. We found the cement foundations that are all that remains of the old POW camp where 60 years ago Nazi soldiers from German battlefields were interned until the end of the war ... AND, we even found one of the infamous dug out canoes that the soldiers had constructed and left behind !!! I was thrilled - this is one of the places in Manitoba I've wanted to get to, and today we made it ...

Then we had a lovely lunch in the sunshine. As we ate, a huge V of geese flew overhead noisily, as they made their way south ... Then it was time to pedal back ...

For some reason the pedal out took less time and was easier then the pedal in ... Along the way we saw more grouse, and a whack of Whiskey Jacks (Grey Jays), who noisily protested our presence on the trail ...

Then about 3 hours after we started we arrived back at the van and loaded up the bikes and headed back home to Minnedosa - we had pedaled atleast 20.2 kms round trip (that's 12.5 miles to my non-metric readers) ... on the way back through the Bison compound the Bison were sitting and standing right alongside the road - I took what I hope will be some good pictures ... It was a good way to spend an Autumn Day ...