Or perhaps this would be more aptly titled “West Lynne, Manitoba.”
Apparently, when I crossed into Manitoba, I encountered the surliest Canadian border guard I had even met in my many (read “four”) trips to Canada. Every other time, I’ve met genial, talkative folks. This guy, on the other hand, was sick of everybody’s crap, mine most of all. I guess Canadians have bad days, too.
I considered going all the way to Winnipeg, but I decided against it. As much as I would have liked to visit the provincial capital, it would have taken a lot of time for somewhere that really didn’t matter all that much to me. That would be three hours there and back alone. Anything I did would be extra time. Had there been a legendary cache there, I might have done it, but there were much better ways to use that time. I still went ahead and did a couple of caches while I was there. The first was a Virtual at the Manitoba sign coming into Canada. I used my trusty and long traveled umbrella as a stand-in for me in the required photograph. I also popped into the visitors’ center there to administratively fail to buy a key ring. They only had one, the display model, and the clerk had never sold one in the time she had been working there (possibly because they only had one and it wasn’t theoretically for sale?). When she tried to ring the display key ring up, it didn’t come up in their system. Failing that, her manager figured out how much it would cost with tax, but I could only purchase it with cash. I rarely carry American cash, much less Canadian cash, so that was a no-go, as well. After my stunning failure at engaging in capitalism, I went to a second, slightly more difficult cache.
On a hill behind the visitors’ center is another sign welcoming people to the province at the top of a small hill. At that sign was a trackable hotel. After all the miles I had put in driving over the course of the day, a good brisk walk would do me some good. I trotted over to the hill to find a complicating factor: there was a small moat around the base. Luckily, on the back side of the hill was a section where a path had been recently mowed up the hill and the detritus was enough to clog and fill in the moat at that spot, allowing me to pass over it in relatively dry conditions. I followed the path through the waist-high grass up to the top. Inside the sign was an ammo can, awaiting my discovery. None of the six trackables that were supposed to be in the hotel were there. People need to be better about logging them. But I had five I had been carrying for quite a while, so I went ahead and dropped them all in. It left me free of all trackables (except of course for my umbrella), but I felt I had more than done my duty, bring them from Austin to Canada. Once my work there was done, I walked back to the center and the car. I thought about getting food there, but nothing nearby was all that interesting to me. Anything that sounded good was an hour and a half away in Winnipeg, so I decided to just head back to the US. Not the most exciting foray into Canadian lands, but at least I can say I was there. I headed back south and, after an encounter with possibly the most empathetic US border patrol officer, the karmic scales had rebalanced, and I continued on to…
Geocaching While Black 