I was sitting beside her, my feet on the dash, a map in my lap. We were heading west along the Trans-Canada Highway. We had left Winnipeg after breakfast, and now were coming up on Portage la Prairie, where we were meant to cut off onto the Yellowhead. We made the turn and continued northwest, past all the little railway towns: Woodside, Gladstone and Neepawa. We arrived in Minnedosa in the afternoon and got a hotel room, and dinner, and directions to the hamlet of Clanwilliam, which we had been told might be the best place in the country to spend some time if we wanted to learn a few things about curling. Clanwilliam is ten kilometres north of Minnedosa, but getting there can be confusing the first time you try, and we made a couple of false starts. When we did get there, we stopped, as we had been instructed, at the general store to ask directions. We were looking for the Clanwilliam curling rink. But if the general store was the only place we saw in Clanwilliam, we wouldn’t have gone home unhappy.
