Canada 5

If you look at a map you will see that Winnipeg is almost exactly north of the North Dakota-Minnesota border.  And boy can you tell!  The Scandinavian accent is carried up to here.  And so far, since we left Calgary, the terrain has been very muck like Nebraska - FLAT with lots of wheat fields.  Also in the Winnipeg area we are surrounded, literally by hundreds of thousands of migrating Canadian geese.  They definitely do have the sound of autumn. 

Yesterday we made two stops on our visiting.  Our first was a nature center called Fortwhiyte Alive.  It's a 640 acre center that has a 30-head Bison herd, 5 lakes, 7km of trails, Prairie Dog Town (with 21 inhabitants, they think), bird feeding stations, a Prairie sod house, tipi encampment, floating boardwalks and an aquarium.  The sod house was fun to go in until you read that this "house" which consisted of one room probably no bigger than an average kitchen in today's houses would hold, during winter, 6-8 family members and 2 oxen!  It was a beautiful day for a hike with blue sky and temperatures hovering around 15 degrees (that's about 62 for you non-metric types).

Our next stop was at the Royal Canadian Mint where I got to hold about $500,000 in my hands!  In the lobby, under armed guard and chained to the floor, was a gold bar that weighted about 30 pounds, was worth about $500,000 and was 999.9% pure.  This site creates all the circulation coins for Canada and 60 other governments (including us).  A little info we were given that you probably haven't heard, but the US is in talks to this mint about creating another dollar coin for us.

During the tour we were told that ALL coins made are usable currency, even those that are "collectibles".  You could take your collectible coins to a bank and they would accept it just like regular currency.  They create all circulation currency here while special and collector pieces are done in Ottawa.  The paper currency is actually authorized to be done by a private company.  Hopefully today will be great weather again for our next outside adventure.