Our goal for this summer is to head west to Alberta to see the Jasper Ice Fields and some other attractions, such as the Alberta dinosaur park. It’s early May, so provincial parks are still not open. We managed to find a private RV part, Lilac Resort, just this side of Winnipeg, Manitoba that said they were open and had flush toilets, showers, electricity and water. Yeah! We are on our way!
Lilac Resort was something that we had not encountered before. It mainly caters to seasonal RV owners, but has tent sites, RV sites, and cabins that can be rented on a short term basis. The unusual, for us at least, twist is that seasonal sites are allowed to contain just about anything as long as one item on the site has wheels. Yep, wheels.
There must be a zoning regulation that has created this type of place. Seasonal site “owners” (more on this later) can build or attach any structure they want (we didn’t see any evidence of any kind of restrictions) to the item with wheels.
Some site additions seem well done. Others, not so much…
In some of these sites, evidence of the wheeled vehicle is minimal. In other sites the wheeled vehicle doesn’t even look like a vehicle or trailer at all. The mobile home seen here is called a “Park Home” and there really are wheel hidden underneath somewhere.
A discussion with one of the seasonal “owners” revealed that the seasonal sites are actually leased from the property owner. The maximum lease period is 1 year and costs about $4000 (includes electricity, water, sewage and garbage pick-up). Doesn’t sound too bad, until we found out that it costs from about $80,000 and up to get one of these sites. Another site was selling for $114,000 and included a 15 year old trailer and a simple flat deck.
$80k is the low-end and gets you a site with no trailer. So what do you get for your $80,000? You get the ability to enter into a 1 year lease with the property owner plus whatever site improvements have been made. In the case of the $80,000 site there are no improvements. Also, your lease of the site is at the whim of the property owner, and can be cancelled at any time.
The seasonal person I talked to said that he knew of two leases that had been cancelled because the children of the lessees had been causing problems in the resort.
The resort caters to families and children in particular. There are 3 swimming pools, fishing pond, stage (live bands/acts, films, sporting events, etc).
The park is quite large and has over 300 sites.
The park was built on swamp land, and swampy boggy areas are everywhere. We are glad we came early in the spring because the mosquitoes will be horrendous in the summer and fall.
The campground was well maintained, and there were at least a dozen employees involved in maintenance and clean-up activities.
We noticed that the electrical and plumbing maintenance is being done by regular maintenance staff and is definitely not up to code. Some of the wiring looks seriously sketchy! The 30 amp box at our site was hanging by its wires.
It felt a bit surreal to walk thru the streets of seasonal sites. The styles, designs, materials and skill levels were all over the map. Twenty year old trailers with decks assembled by first-time DIYers are adjacent to brand new Park Homes with professionally finished outbuildings and fences.
Many sites had small garages or shelters for golf carts. I bet there are golf cart traffic jams during high season.
We saw one golf cart that had three rows of bench seats, the local limo?
Our campsite was nice and reasonably private. We used the tent site next to us to set up our badminton net.
The park is not fully opened yet, as we discovered when we saw “Boil water before drinking” signs on the faucet next to the restrooms (the faucets at the camp sites had not yet been turned on). When we enquired in the office we were told that yes water was available, but not potable water. This would have been nice to know before we made our reservation (back to buying 4 litre bottles of water from the grocery store).
We were unable to arrange a visit to the vet for SweetPea (she needs a spay and gastropexy – which we want done laparoscopically). It seems that there aren’t a lot of vets that use the minimally invasive procedure we are looking for, and those that do are booked for many weeks or months in advance.
We had some time to kill, so off to a dog park in Winnipeg. Really nice dog park. Artificial turf, so no mud.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing we managed to locate the Winnipeg Market Square. Lots of places to choose lunch from and a nice outdoor seating area next to a river.
Trip Summary:
Depart: Bed n Bale (Kenora Ontario, Canada) 12:15 pm May 8; Odometer: 224294 km
Arrive: Lilac Resort (east of Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada) 3:30 pm May 8; Odometer: 224495 km
Gas Summary:
Steinbach (May 10): 63.9 l @ $1.66/l (CAD$106.03) – ODO 224631