Maritimes - Day 1

Our first travel day ended with a few hiccups, but nothing too bad happening, and found us relaxing in Winnipeg, after spending the evening with the kids in the hotel pool.

We got out of the house a bit later than we wanted to, but only by 10 minutes, and the drive to Brandon was fairly easy, with just a quick stop at the Manitoba border for a picture by the sign.  At Brandon, we filled the van with gas and ate a quick lunch out of the food in the cooler, at which point I realized we were late for our tour appointment at the Royal Canadian Mint, as I had been roughly calculating our time to get to Winnipeg, and the Mint is on the east side of the city.

I drove a bit faster for that last two hours to Winnipeg, but arriving on time was not meant to be.  Bradley got sick just before Portage, as he had been trying to play video games in the car, and he gets motion sick.  Looks like his video game playing will have to happen in the hotel when he's not moving as much.  Then, of course, there was a bit of construction.  And finally, we were probably going to be about 15 minutes late, but I managed to miss the exit to the road we needed to take, and it took a bit of time to turn around and find our way back to the correct road. 

We ended up missing our tour, so we just walked around the gift shop and looked at all the flags before heading to Superstore to pick up a few food items for supper and for the trip tomorrow.

Then it was over to the hotel, where we slowly got everything moved from the van into the hotel room, ate supper and then Sandra and I took the younger three kids to the pool and waterslide while Alex watched a soccer game in the room.  The kids loved the pool, and we had to drag them out at 8:30 in order to get everyone back to the room and ready for bed.

Tomorrow we pack up super early and head to Thunder Bay.  I'm actually a bit excited about this part of the drive, as I have never driven east of Winnipeg.  All of my road trips have either ended here or turned south to head into the US.