96° 48' 35"

Friendly Manitoba. Yup, those Manitobans sure do live up to what's written on their license plates. I arrived in Winnipeg to be immediately confronted with this province's flagrant on the cuff friendliness. I rented a car at the airport and was greeted and served by the friendliest rental car guy ever. Michael quickly went through the rental spiel without the customary you-gotta-take-this-extra-car-insurance-even-though-you've-already-got-enough-coverage-up-to-your-yang-yang-on-your-visa-card pressure tactic, gave me the extra-driver option at no charge, and finally set me up with this cute cappuccino coloured Kia Soul; that's right, the car of choice by none other than the Pope himself.  With a hardy real man handshake, and after warning me for the umpteenth time about the many photo radar traps in the city, as well as the location of these money grabbing photo shoots, Michael wished both of us a pleasant trip as if he was seeing off two of his best ever buddies. So off we went, navigating through the many potholed streets of Winnipeg with our cappuccino coloured Popemobile.  

That Manitoba 'feel' is definitely here.  Comfortable and safe. When planning a trip to Manitoba, I often catch myself thinking of it in terms of “going home”; this is where the comfortable comes in. When I’m in Winnipeg, I refer to home as my real present-day home, in Vancouver, where Madeleine and I nested a while back and have raised our kids. But then again, that is when we are actually residing in Vancouver and not traipsing in some far off land during one of our many overseas interludes.  I’m sure I’m not the only one for whom the term home refers to more than one place. In my mind though, Manitoba, and more specifically Winnipeg, is what I consider my home, regardless of the fact that I've spent most of my adult life in Vancouver (not to mention the other 15 years galavanting in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia). So I guess, even though I no longer have a dwelling in Manitoba, this place is still where my family is, where my roots are, and I guess where my heart is. When arriving here, it's as if I am returning to deep roots, to interconnectedness, to familiarity, to salt of the earth decency, and to my home.

Manitoba feels safe, especially in recent times when much of the rest of the world feels unsafe due to the seemingly unravelling of the world order. Winnipeg is both the biggest small town and the smallest big city you can find. It's size and it's geographical location within the world (as in the middle of nowhere) makes it unassuming and unpretentious on the global stage, and thus very unlikely to become a target by one of those mentally deranged degenerates who likes to blow up people and things to make some kind of point. When a city's strongest distinguishing features are it's harsh frigid winters or its savagely rabid mosquitos, (and of course, must not downplay the fact that it is the birth place of Winnie the Pooh), this little city is usually bypassed if not totally ignored by those depraved nutbars whose only road to fame in their sorry lives is by creating terror and havoc.

Of course, this was not always the case. At least not to my father. I remember back in the 1960's when, like today, things in the world seemed to be unravelling out of control with Nikita Khruschchev rattling his soviet cage by threatening to install nuclear missiles at the doorsteps of North America. During that week known as the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone around us was talking about an imminent nuclear apocalypse and scurrying around drawing plans to build bomb shelters, my Dad, cool headed as he always was, one night nonchalantly informed us at the dinner table that we were not going to be building a nuclear bomb shelter because, if and when the bad and mean Russian commies would strike, they would surely send the first nuclear warhead our way in Winnipeg, because Winnipeg was located just a few miles west (18 to be precise) of the longitudinal centre of North America. No bomb shelter could protect the city of Winnipeg from complete annihilation. As Yosemite Sam (my hero at the time) would have said, we would be blown to smithereens.