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Winnipeg, Manitoba
Late afternoon, another day is nearly done, a darker gray is breaking through a lighter one
The fourth (yes, the fourth) part of this 2010 Weekend Trips Slideshow starts in the great white north, in the spring, in Winnipeg.
We’re starting at the pedestrian bridge connecting the Forks (a section of Winnipeg) to St Boniface, a French part of town across the Red River. My visit to St Boniface centered on its terrific ruined cathedral, a shell of a facade hiding a more contemporary building behind its hollow shell.
While I may never return to some of these small provincial Canadian cities (take that, Saskatoon), it is entirely possible that I may return to the Peg sometime after 2012 to see Antoine Predock's over the top Canadian Human Rights Museum, still under construction. Looks promising. Or confusing. Or (hopefully) both.
Saturday is Hockey Night in Canada, and since the Winnipeg Jets have been exiled to Phoenix, the hometown team is the AHL's very own Manitoba Moose (an affiliate of the Canucks) who play downtown at the MTS Centre. I bought a ticket before I left and was lucky enough to get a front row seat. The Moose lost 3-2 to the hated Grand Rapids Griffins, but the game was entertaining- lots of checking, a few great fights, some pretty scoring plays and a mascot dressed up as a possibly surly moose. What more could I ever want than that.
We’ve left the Peg and are headed to the Emerald City in dramatic fashion. Instead of showing our boring arrival driving up the 5 from Sea-Tac, we’re instead pretending that we came in from the ferry from Bainbridge Island, only a quick 35 minutes away.
Seattle Center may be more than the Space Needle, but honestly that’s what we came to see. The view toward Seattle is always spectacula, even if the mountain is hiding today. As for the rest of Seattle Center, Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project always takes a good picture (regardless of whether or not is actually good architecture), and Richard Serra’s Wake at the nearby Olympic Sculpture Park is always fun.
Seattle now has a light rail connection from the airport (which is normally like my thing) but I rented a car so I could drive out and see this, the Bellevue Arts Museum by Steven Holl. It’s fun on the outside but more fun (at times) on the inside where, unfortunately, photos were not allowed.
In Seattle, we’ve already visited the Space Needle, the outside of the Frank Gehry building, the Olympic Sculpture Park and even drove out to see a Steven Holl building. The only pilgrimage site left is probably pretty easy to guess. Rem Koolhaas' Central Library is still there (which means that I’m still going to visit it) and it’s still as much fun (or trouble) as it's always been.
Winnipeg, Seattle and now a quick trip to the Smokies. The randomness of the 2010 Weekend Trips Slideshow lives on in Part Four.
Despite a delayed flight, awful local traffic and a forecast that called for a 30% chance of rain (with the reality bring a 100% chance of an all day rain), I still managed to get in a few all too short hours at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, weaving all over the Tennessee side of the park. The big thing with the Smokies is that they look, well, smoky. A generally pretty cool effect and one that was really magnified during an actual all day rain event. The problem was that while the mountains looked atmospheric at lower elevations, they all but disappeared at higher ones.
My original plan was to climb the very popular and always busy Chimney Tops Trail, but with the weather and visibility being less than ideal, I decided to stick to the low undiscovered country instead. This is Hen Wallow Falls, two and a quarter miles up and into the rainy backcountry, on a trail that could best be described as beautiful. And while the trail to Hen Wallow Falls is in fact beautiful, it also could accurately be described as unpopular (I saw no other hikers the entire four and a half miles) and slippery (sections of muddy clay made for awful trail conditions). To get to the trail you had to find the Cosby campground, a good half hour northeast of Gatlinburg and nowhere near any of the park's big attractions. Then once you find it, you're all by yourself, unless of course you count the old growth forest and the waterfalls and all those bear warning signs facing you at seemingly every turn.
