#1: [31-Jul-01]

17-Dec-2004 -- It was Friday morning and we were all packed for our weekend trip to Winnipeg for a wedding of a friend of Christie and I. It was going to be a long drive (5 hours) so we thought we'd break it up and find a confluence point on the way there. Christie had painstakingly looked at a lot of potential confluence points we could go for and meticulously written them down and then conveniently forgot them at home. So, we were just driving along the highway and I said "Hey, we just past 102°W lets just try and find the closest one." That was the extent of our planning (actually, I bought a can of soup at a gas station planning on eating it at the "big point" but forgot it in the car).

So we drove around on a bunch of roads and Christie told us how she was afraid of trains so we made sure to look both ways at all of the train crossings. Soon we found a good place to stop and hopped out of the car and slid under the barbed-wire fence risking torn clothes and prosecution to begin our adventure.

We hiked across the field for a while bearing the brutally sharp straw that poked our legs every step we took (actually it wasn't that sharp, just a bit disconcerting). After a while of walking (and Christie falling over randomly once) we finally came to the confluence where we danced around for a few more minutes to pinpoint the location. We snapped a couple of pictures, watched the clouds flying by overhead (it was terribly windy), and started running back to get a few pictures before the sun set completely.

Overall, it was a pretty exciting trip. We didn't see any of the mosquitos that the other group complained so much about (they must have just been imagining them) nor did we get wet and muddy. This was just my first confluence but I'll be sure to have a few more pages up by the end of the summer (maybe with the three of us again). Until then, so long.