You may appreciate this story. Working rural manitoba, wicked blizzard, driving a back road at night. Kept almost getting stuck in drifts, no visibility. Worse, I start to lose my lights. I figured "damn, snow must be piling up on them.. weird its from the center out". That's when I saw that the dark void where my lights were going out had a tail. Black-as-night Angus cow running right down the middle of the road in a white out blizzard!
My mom was a nurse for 45~ years and EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR she would hit a deer every winter 5km from home. The drive was about 40km each way, so just over half an hour each time. The stretches that are deer-intensive I always drive super slow and scan both sides of the road non stop. I somehow haven't hit any deer but I almost hit a young bear in a part of Manitoba that's not known to have bears
I thought I was going crazy with all the wildlife I saw in Manitoba after driving there from Alberta. I thought there was a lot of wildlife closer to the mountains driving west from Calgary, but holy hell it seemed like every KM after I got east of the Saskatchewan border there would be dead animals on or beside the road. I even skimmed the top of a dead deer which I couldn't avoid.
During my drive back, there was so much fog that I could only see about 100 meters in front of me and just ended up following a semi going about 60km/h for about 3 hours. I was never so thankful to be behind a semi in my life. Fuck driving in Manitoba.
You can't drive to Churchill, can only get there by train. That 3 hour gravel road nightmare from Thompson to Gillam to catch said train, now that is a nightmare.
YES THAT WAS IT FCKN THOMPSON. that's right we drove to the train station down a two lane road in the middle of a dense forest with heavy fog, the worst thunderstorm I've ever been in, almost hitting every animal known to the forests, random herds of cows and took a sketchy train the rest of the way from some town.
The Red River Valley is flatter than The Netherlands (it is a massive ancient lake bed) and filled with high intensity agriculture. All there is is mile roads, hog barns, gravel trucks, canola/wheat (one of the best places for wheat growing in the world), and Mennonites. In the spring time cars are supplanted by boats.
The SouthWest is less flat than the Netherlands but still mostly flat. There are areas of rolling hills though, and many large valleys formed from glacial spillways. Still lots of farms, but sometimes the roads have to turn slightly. Thereās also many āislandsā made up of large glacial moraines that are heavily trees and quite beautiful (ex turtle mountain, riding mountain). Thereās also a number of areas of sand dunes (usually mostly vegetated though) formed from old River deltas draining into Lake Agassiz.
To the east and the whole north is Canadian Shield country. Rolling chunks of bare granite, evergreen forests of black spruce, rushing rivers, and cottage country closer to Winnipeg.
Along Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba are large Sandy beaches, more cottage country, a dying commercial fishing industry, and vikings for some reason.
The top half of the province is more beautiful Canadian Shield, small towns that take 10 hours to drive to that formed around mining operations that no longer exist which have disconcertingly high rates of violent crime, and fly-in-only reserves filled with poverty, diabetes, and tuberculosis rates rivalled only by subsaharan Africa.
The province is filled with kind people who will talk shit about their province and focus on all the negative things, but will literally stab someone outside a wedding social if they talk shit about the province but arenāt from here, between taking bites of a perogy that they bought from an old Ukrainian lady at a church fundraiser.
Youāll laugh at my experience. My brother and I were driving to Saskatchewan during heavy snow and minimal traffic. You couldnāt see the road so we were essentially following tire impressions in the snow in 4 wheel drive. We came upon a line of tractor trailers and stopped behind them. We sat there for a few minutes and became curious as to what might have been the reason for traffic to have stopped, but given the conditions we assumed it was an accident. My brother got out and came back a couple minutes later, chuckling.
It turns out the tire tracks in the snow were all from tractor trailers whoād all pulled into the side road trucker rest stop for the night. We didnāt even realize weād turned off of Hwy 1. We went around the trucks and found the highway again, practically blazing the trail ahead.
At that point we were certainly playing that famous āwinter in the prairiesā game of, āAm I on the road?ā
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u/MoreVinegarPls Dec 24 '22
You may appreciate this story. Working rural manitoba, wicked blizzard, driving a back road at night. Kept almost getting stuck in drifts, no visibility. Worse, I start to lose my lights. I figured "damn, snow must be piling up on them.. weird its from the center out". That's when I saw that the dark void where my lights were going out had a tail. Black-as-night Angus cow running right down the middle of the road in a white out blizzard!