A visit wouldn’t be complete without a museum day (yeah, we know, you all know that about us!).  First though, it is off to the gym – there is an Anytime Fitness location right across from the Vietnamese restaurant, a quick walk or, in the case of this morning in 40 degree temps with wind, drive away. 

Exercised and cleaned up, we head off to our first stop:  The Royal Mint, where we take a fabulous 90-minute tour of the facility.  Built in 1976 to help handle the coin circulation needs of Canada, the mint has expanded over the years to produce 15 million coins per day, 70% of those for foreign countries!  95% of all materials are Canadian, and they produced the first colored coin, a commemorative glow in the dark coin to celebrate Canada’s 150^th anniversary in 2017 as well as creating new techniques to create more durable and cost-effective coins.  A fascinating tour – sadly without photos!  At the end of the tour we were lucky enough to watch the coin stamping process in the machine room.  Dozens of machines stamping out all sorts of coins usings dies that only last for 8 hours.  There were also big barrels full of mistakes or coins that were not correct, ready for recycling.  Really worthwhile.

Back into town, we stop and park near the Manitoba Museum, the natural history museum here.  But first:  Lunch!  Finding a suitable place that is open around the corner, we walk over to the James Avenue Pump House, an old pumping station from the early 1900s now converted into a restaurant.  Excellent choice – not only is there great history here, the food is stellar as well.  Pub grub elevated!  History first:  The Pumping Station was built after a large fire on Main Street couldn’t be extinguished with the existing water supply system. The answer was this pump house, considered to be one of the most sophisticated water supply system in the world at the time.   The restaurant and bar are wrapped around a big area of the original pump room, preserved behind glass windows, making for a great dining atmosphere.

We happily settle in with a Nonsuch beer (we’ll explain more about Nonsuch after the museum), a great glass of Pinot Grigio and a huge Chicken Schnitzel sandwich and BBQ Pork Bahn Mi.  Perfect meal!

Then it is on to the Manitoba Museum, which is a fantastic history and natural sciences museum – filled with children who we mercifully manage to avoid for the most part of our visit!  Starting in the history section, we learn about the founding of Manitoba (descendants of 2 Native tribes and European traders with its own culture, language and traditions), the importance of Bison (30 million at the peak, sustenance for Indigenous life then a global commodity for fur and meat which led to over hunting, slaughter and eventual disappearance from Manitoba), and the Nonsuch!  A ship that sailed from England in 1668 and whose trading voyage launched the Hudson’s Bay Company.  Now the beer name makes sense!

Moving through the displays, we learn more about the strategies to entice Europeans to settle here, the Chinese Immigration Act (basically Chinese exclusion), which morphed into Indigenous artists – Daphne Odjig in particular who was one of the founders of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. (PNIAI) group that changed the perception of Indigenous art (and whose progressive aging photographs were really cool).  Then it was back to more natural history with dinosaur bones – a rare Hadrosaur or “duck-billed” dinosaur, collected in the Red Deer River Valley, a Pliosaurid Plesiosaur that was massive and just a juvenile and a wild giant Ground Sloth that I played with!

There are incredible well done dioramas of Indigenous life as well as information on the polar bear (the word Arctic comes from the Greek word Arktos, which means bear; there may be only 12,000 Polar Bears left, placing them on the endangered list), the Beluga Whale which is considered Hudon Bay’s “Gentle Giant” and the migrating barren-ground Caribou famous for it’s spectacular migrations of tens of thousands of caribou moving through the tundra.

The highlight for us though is the full size replica of the Nonsuch.  Built in 1968 in England to celebrate the 300^th anniversary of The Hudson Bay Company (HBC), the replica sailed to Montreal then up the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes.  She was then fitted onto a huge semi-truck and hauled to Seattle where she began a West Coast tour through the Puget Sound.  Afterward, she was dismantled and shipped here to the Manitoba Museum, where she was re-erected and the gallery where Nonsuch resides was constructed around her.  Totally amazing.

Surrounding the ship are little stores and buildings that replicate a trading town of the town, all decked out with traditional furnishings and items from the era. 

Past the Nonsuch is an entire HBC historical exhibit which displays everything from a typical 1920’s era retail store to cultural objects obtained by the company officers to a replica company living quarter.  Incredibly well done.

Next, we are back to more animal dioramas, a display with original Bombardier snowmobiles (the iconic Canadian vehicle), random Ukrainian Rye farm dioramas, Indigenous headdresses, Japanese-Canadian persecution displays (west coast residents’ property seized, sent to Manitoba to work on Beet Farms), an historical Winnipeg street completed replicated including houses you could enter, a restaurant, even an old fashion dentist office, complete with patient in chair. 

So much to see!  You could (and we did) spend hours here just wandering from display to display trying to take in the wealth of information available.  We didn’t even see everything, eschewing the Planetarium and Science Gallery as we knew it would be filled with all the children we had so far successfully avoided.  We’re good!  It is already early afternoon when we were ready to move on, now to the outdoors at Assiniboine Park, and….yes…more museums!