This photograph caught my eye while I was waiting for my sister to arrive for our lunch date at Resto Gare in St. Boniface. When I asked the staff about it I was told it showed Winnipeg residents waiting at the St. Boniface train station to be evacuated from the city during the 1950 flood.
The St. Boniface train station in the photo is now the Resto Gare eating establishment, still, in the very same location, it was during the flood. The original building is over a hundred years old.
The St. Boniface train station in 1930
It was built in 1913. In 1983 the building became a restaurant called La Vieille Gare and in 2008 the name was changed to Resto Gare Bistro. 
They have a bell in their dining room from a locomotive that used to pull into the St. Boniface Station. 
My sister and I sat in an old observation train car built in 1914 that has been attached to the station house. 
The restaurant serves meals with a definite French flavor and in the background as you eat you will hear the latest Montreal francophone music. 
I tried in vain to find some photos of the train station in the late 1950s because during the 1958-1959 school year I was attending classes at Marion School right across the street from the station. I must have seen the old train station every day when I arrived at school.
My grade one class at Marion School with our teacher Ms. Bourreau.
My family lived in Winnipeg’s French Quarter the year I was in grade one because my father was an intern at St. Boniface Hospital. Marion School was built in 1950 and is still in use today.
Having lunch at Resto Gare with my sister was a chance for a lovely visit but also a way to learn some history and take me on a bit of trip down memory lane.
Other posts……..
It couldn’t have been easier. I registered online, found the things I needed and put them in my ‘shopping cart.’ Then I picked a delivery time. I noted that if you chose less popular delivery times the cost of delivery was as low as $4.95. What a bargain! Someone would pick out my groceries for me in the store, bag them and deliver them right to my door for $4.95? If I figured out my time shopping, gas for the car and monetized the effort spent hauling the groceries from my parking garage up to my condo I was even going to be ahead financially. I also found I stuck to my list better shopping online and wasn’t enticed by other ‘deals’ I might have succumbed to shopping in the actual store so my weekly total was quite a bit lower than usual. 
Jennifer Chen is the mother of two young children who came to Canada in 2009. She wants the voices of all families to be heard at the school board table. Ms. Chen has a masters degree and her thesis focused on the health and well-being of communities. She is active in numerous community organizations. She has been campaigning since August and talking to as many people in our ward as she can to find out what their concerns and hopes and ideas are. 
Rey Sangalang is the other trustee candidate in Ward 6. As of my writing this he had not yet filled out the candidate questionairre on the 
On Friday my friend Esther and I paid a visit to the Amsterdam Tea Room just beside Old Market Square at the heart of the Exchange District. I had been there before for tea but never for a meal. As the name of the restaurant indicates there is a distinctly Dutch flavor to the menu items. 
I had a vegetable sandwich with beet soup
and Esther had the endive, pear, grape salad with the pea, celery and leek soup. 
They have dozens and dozens of kinds of tea on offer at the Amersterdam Tea Room. I opted for the Pina Colada tea and Esther chose a chai blend. We had a lovely meal at a sunny window table and caught up on what had happened in each of our lives since we last got together. 
We had planned to sketch in one of the many art galleries in the Exchange but it was such a gorgeous day we sat at a picnic table in Old Market Square to work on some new pages in our sketch books. 
Winnipeg, we decided, is a beautiful place indeed on a fine fall afternoon!
As someone who bikes all over Winnipeg I am thrilled to see so many new designated bicycle lanes like this one on Sherbrooke being built. 
Another thing we need in the city however are more bike racks and stands where cyclists can lock their bikes as they shop or dine or visit public spaces and buildings. Last week we joined our children for dinner at The Grove restaurant on Stafford. There were no bike racks in sight and all the street signs around already had a couple of bikes locked up to them. We ended up walking a few blocks to find a street sign that we could use for locking up our bikes. 
On Saturday morning we went to Hildegard’s for coffee and right in front of the bakery and coffeeshop was a bike stand. Perfect! I am not sure who is responsible for putting up bike racks and stands- the city or businesses or community groups. But if we want to encourage more people to cycle it is important to give them places to lock and leave their bikes. 
It was neat to view the city from the river perspective especially all the grand homes along the banks. We saw deer and pelicans and herons and signs of beavers at work. People were so friendly- saying hello, reminding us to drink water, commenting on our paddling strokes, waving and shouting greetings to us from bridges. 
During the first half of our journey the river was very shallow and we went aground a couple of times on sandbars that extended on for quite a distance. 
At one point when Millie and I couldn’t seem to free ourselves from a sandbar a kindly gentleman who lived along the water donned his hip waders and came out to help us, showing us the channel of deeper water where we could get through. 
We stopped for lunch at Omands Creek Park. Millie had made delicious cheese and vegetable biscuits and brought along some of her homemade spicy pickles from this year’s batch. Mostly though we just drank and drank- plenty of water and a little beer. I hadn’t brought along a water bottle which was silly and I was actually a mite dizzy when we got out of the canoes at lunchtime. 
It was 36 degrees on Saturday but during most of our journey we had a little bit of a breeze to cool us. For the second half of our paddle the river was much deeper, but the current was a little harder to navigate and we encountered some larger boats that created waves for our canoes. 
The distance from Ed and Millie’s house to ours is 15 kilometers as the crow flies so I am thinking we probably paddled at least 20 or more kilometers along our winding river route. 
Once we reached the dock on Waterfront Drive we loaded up the canoes one by one and returned them and then we went back to Ed and Millie’s. 
Dave and Ed took a dip in the Assiniboine to refresh themselves. 
Then we had appetizers and drinks down by the river in Ed and Millie’s lush and lovely back yard. 
A marvelous meal of barbecued pork, kale salad and fresh garden vegetables followed and it was dark before we headed inside for a piece of Millie’s delicious homemade apple pie and ice-cream and a last glass of wine. 