Grand Beach - A Beach and many creatures

    Grand Beach is an endless stretch of white sand a couple hours from Winnipeg. It is glorious! Who needs Hawaii or Mexico for beaches when we have this! The lake is so big you can't even see the other side, it might as well be the ocean. The water is a great temperature for swimming and it has a sandy bottom everywhere. We spent a couple days swimming and paddle boarding here.

Here is a round-up of all the creatures we saw at the Grand Beach Campsite

Frogs

There are frogs everywhere in the wooded campsite. There are tiny ones and large ones, not many in between sizes (teens?). I have no experience with frogs, you don't see many in Alberta. We were amazed by them! We would stand watching until they jumped. Here is my picture of a jumping frog.

    There was probably someone shaking their head at me taking videos of frogs. It's like the tourists I see going nuts over gophers. One lady was pointing at a gopher, she had a huge smile and said "Look!". I saw the gopher, I looked around it, behind it... nothing there. It took me a while to understand that she was excited about the gopher. I wasn't sure what to say. How do you explain about gophers to an international person? In the pantheon of Canadian Wildlife gophers are bottom-rung at best. Heck they probably aren't even on the ladder. You are probably far away from the ladder and can just about see it in the distance. Instead of saying this I smiled and nodded and slowly backed away. 

Mayflies

Elsa wasn't a fan of the campsite, there were, once again, a lot of bugs. A new one to us is the Mayfly. To figure out what it was I had to use Google Lens on it. They are sticky and just sit on things. I had to take a few off the van screen by decree of her majesty princess Elsa. I would pinch their wings and peel them off, their little legs would be waggling around trying to get back on, as if their sole purpose in life was to sit on our van. Then I let go and they fly away.

Bear

Mistakes were made, admittedly. We are usually very good with cleaning up our campsite. Elsa and I were eating s'mores and I assembled one for Josh. We then had to run to the washroom. I turned off the propane fire but forgot about the s'more. At 6 am Josh saw the bear from his roof top tent. It crushed our hapless bug tent and surgically ripped a hole to swipe out the S'more. Shockingly it spit out the Graham Cracker. Is a graham cracker not food to a bear? We have learned our lesson and will be more careful in the future. 

How Canadian are we?

#1 We had s’mores

#2 A bear ate them

#3 We feel really bad about it

Monarch Butterfly

I saw my first Monarch Butterfly in my remembered life. It was so beautiful! They are very large and angular. It is amazing that they manage to fly from Mexico.

Elsa and I walk to the bathroom

Last night at dusk we set out on the long trek to the bathroom. We named all the parts of the journey. First we headed down the long road of jumping shadows. These were frogs that would jump away just when your foot hovered over them, causing you to jump too. After that was the narrow wooded trail of rustling sounds (Elsa would cover her ears to prevent jump scares). Then past the wall of Mayflies clinging to the outside of the building, there were hundreds of them. Then there is the one Mayfly dangling from a spider web right in front of the door. Nightmare fuel! Finally we made it into the washroom, only to find a frog right in the bathroom stall. What memories for Elsa!