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Friday, June 20, 2025

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For the past dozen years former staff of Fort La Bosse School Division, and friends, go on a day long bus tour to a special destination. On June 10, the trip was to Morden, Man. to visit the Canadian Fossil Discovery Center and later a trip to the Pembina Threshermen's Museum in Winkler.

We loaded up at Virden on a luxury tour bus and after a pickup in Brandon, we headed to southern Manitoba. The countryside was filled with gentle valleys and large rolling green fields.

However, there was one item that was not so nice. That being Manitoba PTH#34. In all my years in Manitoba I have never encountered such a rough road. Our tour bus was outfitted with great air ride shock bag absorbers which did not help much over this very rough road. How bad was it? You could not sleep, read or write very well and it seemed every few hundred yards, there would be a major bang where the air bag would bottom out! To add insult to injury we had to return on the same road. To say the least, it was a rough passage that the Manitoba Department of Highways should look into!

When we arrived at Morden fossil museum we were given the most excellent tour and explanations of the center’s purpose and history by a knowledgeable PhD student named Bruno, from Portugal on a summer work project at the museum. He explained how, during the 30s, Morden was a major work site for mining Bentonite, an ingredient in the making of toothpaste. However, because of the unique strata of the soil layers, the work crews kept digging up prehistoric animal bones. This part of Manitoba, millions of years ago, was known as the great Western Internal Seaway - a huge sea in the middle of western North America.

Government archeologists were called in and the site was declared a national historic site, protected from further mineral excavation.

The Center is filled with fossils dug up in the area, with some of them being fully or partially reassembled to show their shape

and size of these prehistoric sea monsters of the deep.

Of course, the main attraction is restored bones of a Mosasaur, the largest one on display in the world. The staff refer to it as Bruce and in its time, it was 43 feet long, over 16 tons, with a long snout and razor-sharp teeth that worked like a conveyer belt to carry the whole pray into its stomach. To give you a sense of its size, it was bigger than the largest mammal in the world today, the great Blue Whale.

Threshermen’s Museum

Over 30 display buildings of early farm life in Western Canada are set up in an old-time village mainstreet style, with each building open to show period artifacts. Some display buildings featured antique cars and tractors and related tools.

There’s a Post Office, MTS, general store, pioneer sod home, RCMP log cabin with jail cells, church, barber shop, school, black smith shed, grain elevator, dinning hall, activity center and a wonderful prairie train station. In fact, the museum is a popular site for weddings, family reunions and graduation events.

As it said in the museum’s brochures, it’s a great place, with acres of fun, history and discovery, well worth the visit.

We leave Winkler late in the afternoon and head for an enjoyable supper in Wawanesa at La Rocque Restaurant with its unique decor of colorful metal signs.

By 9:30pm we’re back in Virden, both excited and tired by our travels and discoveries.

For many of us, we are a whole lot wiser from the many things we saw and learned today. They say the key to a good teacher is to always be a lifelong learner. On that trip we all learned many new and old things.

Trip organizer, former kindergarten teacher Beth Allison said she was very pleased with the trip, the turnout and the friendship shared among the travelers. “I hope that these special travel adventures will continue for many years to come for former educators and friends."

Teachers still learning

By Ed James