Sunday June 7, 2009 – Day 10

We drove into Manitoba ready to go to church in the first big town along the highway, in Brandon. Unfortunately we did not calculate into our schedule the fact that we lost an hour as we went across a time zone change from Saskatchewan where we started out our morning. As a result we were an hour late for the church meetings we had planned to attend. When traveling make sure you know what time zone you are going to in advance!

Swinging Bridge

On our drive to Brandon we had seen a sign along the highway pointing towards Souris, Manitoba mentioning its popular “Swinging Bridge”. We decided it was worth backtracking 30 minutes to visit. The bridge consisted of a suspension bridge over 500 feet long that was build over 100 years ago by a wealthy landowner who wanted an easier way to cross the river to get to his property on the other side.
Today his bridge has been repaired/replaced on at least two occasions when it was swept away either by floods or storms. Each of the kids had so much fun on the bridge however that all of the other tourists became a bit queezy. I had a hard time keeping my 8 year old from bouncing the bridge as he ran across the planks to the other side. Others were not as excited by the movement of the bridge which at this point was swaying and bouncing in all directions. After arriving at the other side we noticed one lady who wanted to take a cab back to the other side rather than walk across again. Her friend convinced her to come along. She agreed but only if my kids would wait until after she had already crossed before going on the bridge again.

I made sure that on the return trip, each of the 8 members of our family were the only ones on the bridge… and was it ever a fun and jumpy ride.