Wok N Roll with us...Bob and Teri Along with Atlas and Kalani: The Pas MB October 12-13 2018

The Pas, MB has a population of just 5300. The highlight of The Pas was our visit to ‘Around the Bend’ Organic farm which is owned and operated by Shawn and Edith Sexsmith. Although the Sexsmiths both have full-time professional jobs they run an organic farm that makes hay, raises chickens, turkeys, pig, and bees. They are also home to the largest buffalo herd in northern Manitoba. The bus shown in the pictures was outfitted by Shawn. It has a mesh floor. In the warmer months, his chickens live in this bus. He has designed a chute on the side to collect all the eggs. Around the top is a rain trough that serves to provide water to the chickens. The chickens naturally fertilize the bison fields. Every week he just moves the bus a little to fertilize a new area. Prior to our arrival Shawn steam cleaned the chicken bus, outfitted it with bales of hay and it was our tour bus for his farm. We also got to get up close to a young bison. It is one that the mother and herd rejected and they have bottle fed. Every day Shawn takes eggs to town and also collects leftover food from various businesses that he feeds to both his pigs and bison.

While in The Pas we also had a Pickerel Fish fry. Pickerel is a white fish, similar to Walleye and is quite tasty. While dining on Pickerel a local Birch syrup harvester gave us a talk on how they harvest Birch syrup in the bush.

From there we visited the Sam Waller Museum. It is housed in the old courthouse building and still has several original jail cells downstairs. The museum houses the private collection of Sam Waller. The collection not only includes the truly strange and bizarre but also houses an important record of the natural and cultural history of The Pas and its surrounding area. The collection was really quite unusual. Like I must admit I have never seen fleas dressed in full formal clothing (only viewed through a magnifying glass).

We were all invited to the local Canadian Legion for a drink and table shuffleboard before heading back to our increasingly cold, no utilities Casino Parking lot that we called home for two nights. The morning we headed out from there to Thompson was a bit questionable. The roads had 6 inches of snow for a 250-mile trip pulling trailers or driving large motorhomes. And that was after scraping all that snow off our slides so that we could get them retracted in order to head down the road. Everyone made that trip without incident but there is still debate on how wise traveling that unplowed road was. That 250 miles are some of the lonelier roads in Canada and things could have easily not come out as well especially because there were people on the trip that had never driven in the snow at all, and almost all had never driven their rig in the snow.

But after 3 days of no utilities, electric looked really great once we arrived in Thompson.