Day 33 – July 9 – Ottawa, ON

Today was quite a lazy day. We stayed in our room until noon. I wrote and posted yesterday’s blog because the internet was down all day yesterday and John had received the text of Sunday’s worship service so he found the music videos to embed and got it ready to post.

We had visited the Museum of Nature in 2014 but we figured it was worth another look. I bet if I looked back on the blog for that day I would find I photographed almost the exact same things! We do know what we like.

There are four levels to the museum with two gallerys on each. First floor is Owls and Fossils, which we skipped. Second floor is Mammals and Water. Third floor has Earth and Birds and the fourth floor has an exhibit on the Arctic and how it is being effected by climate change, plus a special exhibit you need to buy a separate ticket for which is a journey across more than 80,000 years of Earth’s history – AKA more dinosaurs so we did not go there either.

We spent about 2 1/2 hours in the museum. Suprisingly I did not take as many photos as I often do. Some galleries, like Birds, I did not take any at all. I do love the dioramas in the Mammal Gallery though. Although I always feel bad that all these lovely animals have died and then been stuffed for these things.

Both of the males in the diorama had the distinctive ‘shovel’ horn down the front of the muzzle. We always thought each side of the antlers formed a shovel, but each Caribou only had one and the horn from the other side had thin branches. One had the ‘shovel’ come from the right antler and the other from the left.

Hanging from the ceiling in the open middle of the museum’s four levels is an image of the earth taken from space and put on a gi-normous balloon, which revolves at the same speed as the earth does.

In the Queen’s Lantern, which is the glass tower added to the old building when the original tower was removed, hangs the moon. The original tower was torn down because it was leaning and they were worried it would do damage to the rest of the building as well if it fell.

I tried to get a photo of the earth and the moon, but the angle made it hard to get in the limited space and the difference in the light didn’t help either.

You can’t see much of it – again due to angle and limited space but this immature blue whale extends the full length of this room and into the next.

I am not very interested in rocks and minerals but I took quite a few photos in that gallery because the cases of different samples were so colourful. I have no idea what these all are or what they may be used for. Every case told the name of each mineral and where it came from. I have never heard of 99% of them and could not pronounce many of them either.