We had a slower, lazier day today. It was overcast but still pleasant outside.

We went first to Place Fort La Tour. A new heritage site on an ancient land spit in St. John habour.

As we walked the pathway to the fort we stopped to see a new Naval Memorial that was unveiled last month.

The area at Place Fort La Tour has been used by the First Nations people for over 4000 years and there is a burial site near the replicated fort.

While her husband was away, Madame La Tour and her 45 men defended the fort from an attack by D’Aulnay’s war ship for three days but eventually she had to make terms of surrender. She agreed to let D’Aulnay (who was a fellow Acadian and former associate of La Tour’s from Port Royal in Nova Scotia) have the fort in exchange for freedom for her men. D’Aulnay agreed, but he was so enraged that the La Tour men had forced a retreat of his forces a few weeks earlier that he reneged on the terms and forced Mme La Tour to watch as he hanged them. Only two survived. She was so distraught at the betrayal and the death of her loyal men that she died a few weeks later.

The freight port at St. John is building a second crane to offload containers. The federal government contributed $220 million towards the project. They hope it will be completed by the end of the year. The long row of pilings in the photo below is where the new crane will be.

After we visited the fort we walked along the path to the end of the spit and then drove to the St. John Public Garden.

It took me a minute to figure out the letters in the flowers but finally realised they are E R for Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.

It was nice to sit on a bench for awhile and just enjoy the lovely space.

In St. John there is a huge greenspace called Rockwood Park that was donated to the city and is a very popular place to hike, bike, and spend time on the water. The area is also a designate geopark.

This is the Fallen Worker’s Memorial to honor all who have been injured or died in the workplace. It sits outside a small Labour Museum near the entrance to Rockwood Park.

We had our lunch beside Fisher Lake in Rockwood Park and then headed back to our hotel to do nothing until dinner.

Even though we are not rushing here and there and worried about going too far in a day, or trying to see everthing there is to see, we still enjoyed having a quieter day.

Before we headed to St. John this morning we went over to King’s Landing, which is SW of Fredericton. King’s Landing is situated along the Wolastoq (St. John River), and is a 300-acre museum that is home to over 70,000 artefacts and full of costumed characters, farm animals and 70 historic buildings. The museum opens in June each year and closes at Thanksgiving. It is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 to 5. Over 100 people are employed to keep the village running, about half of them play the roles of the people that had the businesses, like the blacksmith, or lived in the homes. They speak as if it is about 1860 and will tell you about ‘their’ family that lived in each of the buildings.

All of the buildings come from an area upriver on the St. John that was lush farming country and villages but was flooded by a dam in the mid-1960’s. There are many buildings, churches and schools now underwater. Some farmers lost generational farms by the flooding.

King’s Landing is huge. It is in two parts, the upper section which was the original location and the lower ‘village’ which has the majority of the buildings. There are two or three horse-drawn wagons that go from the top to the bottom all day and you can hop on and off anywhere you like.

They host special events throughout the season, plus Hallowe’en and Christmas.

This awesome willow branch moose was a project of the New Brunswick School of Design in Fredericton.

We had an awesome day. We arrived a few minutes after opening at 10 and caught the second to last wagon to the entrance at 4:15. We wandered into almost every building; I think we missed only 3 and had some very interesting chats with the ‘residents.’

The lady in this house was waiting for her biscuits to finish cooking and had half-made molasses cookies ready to go in the oven when the biscuits came out. A young man and woman arrived at the back door who had brought her some firewood so she gave them a cold glass of water and a piece of cake she had made yesterday.

The dog’s name is Finnegan. He is a working dog at the museum. His job is to chase the Canada Geese from the property and when his is not doing that he rides on one of the taxi wagons.

Just before we left the school teacher arrived to talk to the missus.

This is one of the buildings we did not get to. It is a sash and door factory. We also missed the grist mill (which was not working) and the stone house.

The woodworker was about to make the legs for a table he was working on. He made his toolbox that is on the floor beside him and had several projects to work on throughout the summer. Many of the items that the staff make are put into the end-of-season auction. All the men and women in the buildings are full-time paid employees. Most are retired or semi-retired from other jobs and work at the Landing to earn extra money or to work in a skill or trade they enjoy.

This young stallion is going to sire the Landing’s next horses.

This fellow sired all the current horses so he can’t be used on any of the mares because they are all related, so he was gelded last week and they bought a new stud.

These young ox calves are three months old and are already being trained to work together. They are always led around the grounds tied together so they will automatically work in step when they are hitched to wagons or plows or whatever. Today was the first day they wore the wooden yoke that will later be replaced by harness. They will not be fully grown until about two, but could be working before that if they are strong enough. They were born the same day to twin momma cows. The Landing held a contest to name them and I forgot the name of the one the lady is leading, but the other one’s name is Buckwheat.

The Landing has a photographer that records things at the village for advertising and promotions and social media. She took lots of photos of the calves today.

Every house has a garden and there is also a large village garden. The King’s Head Inn uses the produce for the menu, and the some of the staff takes it home as well since they have so much. Every house in that period would have had a garden so to keep the property as authentic as possible they plant a garden at all the properties. One of the gardeners was having a lot of fun making this scarecrow coming out of a tree.

I took only a few photos of the many, many rooms we toured today, but I did love this four-poster bed. All the drapery and linens and quilts are made at the Landing by the staff. As are all the costumes they wear. They have a design and costume shop that researches styles and fabrics and makes – by hand or old period sewing machine – all the clothes worn on the site.

His and hers outhouses.

Only two churches were saved from the flooding of the dam -this one, which is Riverside Presbyterian and St. Mark’s Anglican.

This scarecrow is guarding a garden and a plot of flax. The lady of the house will break it into fiber and then have it spun into yarn (her house was not big enough for a spinning wheel).

The man in the print shop showed us all the steps to set type and we learned the origin of some popular expressions in the process. All the letters in the different sizes and fonts were kept in a large cabinet. The capital letters were on the top and the small letters were in drawers underneath: therefore ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case.’ Lines of type were called ‘sorts.’ When you put all the rows of type into a frame and fill it you are now “out of sorts.” An image placed among type (such as a picture of a person in a Wanted poster, is called a chase. If you need to remove it you “cut to the chase.” When you have all your sorts, or lines of type set into a frame, called a phrase, you are “filling out the form” and when you have the phrase full and it is ready to set in the press to print you lock all the lines and corners with a type of key mechanism called a ‘quoin’. Thus you ‘quoin – or as we spell it – coin a phrase’. After you have inked your press and put the initial paper into it you “make your first impression.”

About two o’clock we made it to the King’s Head Inn and enjoyed a delicious lunch.

As we were leaving these men were singing a capella. Lovely voices. And they sang a song about animals and mixed up the animal desciption and the animal name all the time and had a little boy correct them. He never missed a single one either. It was very cleverly done.

When this hook rug is done it is going to be placed at her backdoor.

My mom made braid rugs like this out of fabric scraps.

The blacksmith had designed a beautiful ornate wrought-iron gate and was busy filing the verticals. The gate will be put in the fall auction.

St. Mark’s Anglican Church and the Perley farm.

I had never seen a table loom. She was making a guitar strap for the man that runs the theater and when it was done she was going to make suspender straps for another of the men.

This large loom was in the attic. The lady had been working on this turquoise and purple and blue bolt of fabric for a couple of years.

The broom lady made over 100 brooms last month. She makes scrub brushes and children’s brooms and several sizes and different types of brooms. They are made from sorghum straw.

This is the man that runs the theater. Every once in awhile he goes wandering and singing down the village lanes. One of the ladies I was speaking with said you will know who he is when you see him, “He doesn’t have an ‘inside’ voice.” Haha.

Walking into this house the last few weeks must have been fabulous with all the wild roses in bloom. There were only a few left and it still smelled wonderful.

I took this shot from the wagon we were riding back to the entrance. The two wagons will make two loops of the site to pick up people to get them to the front before the park closes. Last call for a wagon is 4:30. If you miss it you have a long hilly walk back before closing at 5.

It was an hour and a half drive to St. John from King’s Landing. As usual we took the back roads and we saw our first covered bridge in New Brunswick. Still no moose though.

We drove northeast out of Fredericton today to the small town of Minto. Minto was the site of the only Internment Camp in the Maritimes during WWII and they have a museum about life at the camp and those who were interned there.

When we arrived we discovered that the museum was located in the municipal building with several other departments and groups. We thought that this won’t take long then; it can’t be very big. Well, it wasn’t very big, although it did take up the majority of the lowest level of the building, but it had so many interesting items and stories that we were there for about 2 1/2 hours.

The museum guide was a young man named Ryan who is a Biology student at the University of New Brunswick and has worked there the past three summers. He loved sharing the stories and telling us about the many items on display.

He also told us about his first driver’s education lesson. The first thing he was taught was not about stop signs or signalling or anything to do with the rules of the road. His very first driving lesson was how to “correctly hit a moose so as to sustain the least damage.” The lesson was: Moose are tall. Taller than cars. When you see a moose in the road you brake. This will lower the front of the vehicle so if you hit the moose you will connect with the lower legs. This will cause the moose to fall over onto your vehicle where you will likely be seriously injured or killed. So…. if you cannot stop your car in time to avoid hitting the moose – speed up. This will raise the front of your car and you will hit the moose above the knees and knock it away from you. Driving lesson from New Brunswick. The home of many, many moose.

The actual camp was located about 20 km south of Minto in the forest. After we left the museum we stopped there and read the signs. I am going to post them here first because they explain so much about the camp and then I don’t have to type it all.

One side of the big room was information and items specifically from the Ripples Camp. The other side contained things from some of the other camps in Canada. Since the guards were rotated among the various camps in Canada they acquired items made by internees from the other camps they were sent to and many of those have been donated or loaned to the museum.

As usual in museums I took a ton of photos and I am going to post a lot of them here. I will pass along the stories for any items Ryan told us about and that I remember. Otherwise, just lots of photos of things and their museum label so I don’t have to type it all out.

The most severe punishment was 28 days in solitary. The prisoners in this camp were well taken care with food and shelter and an arts and craft building, sports, etc. The work details were comprised of cutting down trees and bucking it up for firewood to keep the huts warm in the winter. There was only a sheet of tarpaper between the inside and outside boards of the huts. They would cut and stack 2500 cords of firewood for each winter that was required to keep the 100 wood stoves of the camp burning. They were paid 20¢ per day in POW money that could be used at the canteen. They were not paid in legal currency.

The prisoners made the birch branch fencing, arbours and benches around the garden.

No prisoners died from abuse or murder at the camp. The few deaths were from illness like pneumonia or accidents.

There was a fellow who enlisted but was turned down due to bad eyesight. He was a piano player and knew 1800 songs from memory, so he decided to provide entertainment to the troops – and he visited all the internment camps. He travelled all across Canada and down the American coast to Hollywood on his bicycle. Along the way he collected pennants from the communities he passed through. There we many of them hanging above this display, plus the pile in the trunk and lots more in storage. Front and center was a pennant from Salmon Arm, BC!

Many of the prisoners were skilled craftsment and they made a large variety of items, some they gave away, some they traded for items in the canteen and some were sold for actual money.

The actual size is the postage-stamp sized one in the lower right.

The peace sign and 007 and LSD were written on the shirt by Poelmann’s grandaughter during the 60s.

The sails are made from shoe leather.

There were several of this type of elaborately carved picture frames. The interesting thing about this one is the back – it was carved from a box of apples that came from the Okanagan Fruit Grower’s Association. They may have even come from one of our family orchards.

John and I immediately recognized the apple box label. I told Ryan I would try find him a good photo of one so he can put it in his display. My cousin is going to check their collection and books for me and send a photo I can pass along if she can find one.

This is a photo of the POW cooks who were all prisoners. They were excellent cooks and the food served to the internees was better than that served to the guards. The local farmers would supply them with whatever they wanted. The food was so good that guards would pay real money to get their meals from them.

There was a prisoner who was an animal trainer and he trained puppies and kittens and would put on circus acts for entertainment. None of the prisoners kept in the camp were actual war soldiers. Even the Germans or Italians were from merchant ships that were in the wrong place at the wrong time – like in one of the Canadian harbours when war was declared. As citizens of nations with whom Canada and Britain were at war they were not allowed to go back and join their nation’s armies to fight. Many of then had no sympathy for the Nazi regime anyway.

After we left the museum we headed back to Fredericton with a brief stop at the site of the camp. We walked along the trail for awhile and came to the location of the sports equipment building, but the black flies and mosquitoes were already attacking in droves so we headed back to the truck.

This is what the camp area looks like today. There are a few foundations of buildings but everything was demolished and the forest has taken over.

Once we got back to Fredericton we went to the Botanical Garden to see some flowers. They have seven specialty beds so we though it would be a nice wander. However the garden is situated in a forest that also has lots of hiking trails branching off in all directions and no signs to show where the gradens were. According to the map at the entrance they were very spread out. We walked for well over half an hour and never found one of them so we took a trail and headed back to the parking lot and then to our hotel.

Tomorrow we drive to St. John and are spending three nights. There are things to see and places to go.

Today involved the least stops of interest so far on this trip. We drove one of the backroads south to Fredericton and arrived in town quite early because there was only one place we stopped, other than to photograph some lovely reflections.

There is a McCain factory at Grand Falls and the first part of our morning was driving past potato farms. They obviously stagger the planting because we saw everything from small plants to full bloom to harvesting.

There is a dam at Tobique Narrows where the Tobique Rive joins the St. John River and the road goes right over the top of it. We stopped on the far side and walked back to take some pictures.

The light was lovely for long stretches of the river further down the road so we pulled over a couple of times to capture the reflections.

Near Perth.

Atop a rise we made another stop to check the forest view.

This was a favourite spot to drop a kayak or fishing boat. There was a home-made launch slide set down the bank.

Up and down hills again, but this time with forest on both sides and not farms.

We arrived in Fredericton about 1:30 and drove right downtown to Queen Street to see Garrison Square.

The parade ground was torn up and under renovation to make a nice park but there was a monument there commemorating the 200th anniversary of the New Brunswick 104th Regiment of Foot and their epic winter march to Kingston, Ontario that we had just read about at the blockhouse yesterday.

We walked next door to the Regional Museum of Fredericton which is located in one of the old garrison buildings. Neither of us was hugely impressed with it but they did have some interesting things and stories. The strangest was two rooms devoted to a ufologist who gave lectures and wrote books on alien encounters. I assume he was a local professor. We did not read too much of it. He was very famous though.

This 17th Century British mortar round was discovered near the site of the British seige of Fort St. Joseph (1696), which is near the mouth of the Nashwaak River.

One room was devoted to the various Accords and meetings that led up to Canada’s Confederation.

There was a room displaying lovely articles made by the aboriginal Madawaska.

It did not take us too long to tour the museum so we wandered down Queen Street to see more of the old buildings. However, there is a Thursday night market in the summer and all the vendors were setting up their tents so all the buildings were blocked by them. We may go back tomorrow and take another look.

We walked through the square and up the steps to the pedestrian overpass to get a photo of the old lighthouse.

It was after 3:30 as we drove the rest of the way down Queen Street and out of town to our hotel. So, all in all a pretty laid-back day.

We have realized we don’t do cities well. We don’t shop, we don’t picnic in parks, or go to art galleries (except once in awhile) and we don’t wander down streets looking in windows at things we don’t want or need. Once we have checked out the museums that interest us we are pretty much done. Does that make us terrible tourists, I wonder?

It had been about an hour and a half after leaving Montmagny this morning when I saw a small waterfall from my window as we crossed a short bridge and entered the town of St. Pascal. This elicitied, “Halt. Turn around. Go back,” instructions. John pulled into a small parking lot and out we climbed to see the falls.

There was a sign at the edge of the parking area, which was only in French. I was able to figure out that it was about a flour mill, but I took a photo and had Google translate it for me this evening.

It says, “The second site of the Seigneurial mill. The first mill (1799) located west of the river was destroyed by fire. In 1854 Lord Ivanhoe Tache had Edouard Ennis build a second flour mill on the east side of the river. The mill, called “Lajoie” served the Lord during reconstruction. The new mill, a three-storey wooden structure, remained in operation from late August to late March, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until 1920. It was primarily used for the production of wheat flour, buckwheat and barley.”

After we took our photos and were heading back to the truck John noticed we were parked in the lot of an ice cream shop. Ice cream for lunch. Perfect. John ordered a three-fruit blend, similar to a DQ Blizzard. It was made with fresh strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. I had a banana split, also made with fresh local strawberries. The chocolate layer was not a syrup but a thick, rich (not sweet) fudge and the pineapple was also yummy. The ice cream was very smooth and creamy. When we had finished eating at a picnic table outside I went back and stuck my head in the door and told the two young men that that was by far the best banana split I had ever had. So good!

Another sign directed us four kilometers off the road to see a covered bridge.

As soon as we crossed the border from Quebec into New Brunswick we entered the Atlantic Time Zone, which now makes us four hours ahead of home in BC.

As we entered the village of Little Falls we spied an old block house on a hill near the road. And another turn around to go see it. It was closed but the information signs were in good condition and the gate at the bottom of the stairs was broken so I was able to climb up. Back in the day they would have a had an excellent view in all directions. Today it was rooftops and trees and a pulp mill and trees so I didn’t take any photos.

With the second story rotated atop the first story there would have been no part of the countryside that could not be watched.

Also at the blockhouse was a story about the remarkable trek of the New Brunswick 104th Regiment, in the winter of 1813, that walked a distance of 1100 kilometers from Fredericton, NB to Kingston, ON to reinforce the British troops as an American invasion was expected to happen there.

If you can make it out, the red line is the route they travelled. The yellow dots are known overnight stopping points and the blue dots may have been overnight stops – as determined by an average travel distance on foot in winter conditions.

We are spending the night in Grand Falls. We stayed here in December 2019 when we flew to Ottawa to help our daughter-in-law, who was six-months pregnant at the time, set up her art work at a gallery for a show. After the show opening she flew back to Texas and we rented a car and drove to New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to find a geocache in each of the province because they were the only two we had not yet made a find. We spent the night at Grand Falls and went to see the Grand Falls but everything was encased in ice and snow. Today it was not, but it is only during the spring melt run-off that there is much water flowing over the rocks.

There are two ziplines across the gorge. You ride over on one and ride back on the other.

The walkway along the front of the Visitor’s Center takes you far enough that you can even see the downriver part of the gorge.

We drove across the bridge and went down to the viewing platform we could see by the zipline shack in the photo above. This allowed us to see more of the falls and a better angle on the gorge under the bridge.

This is the Little River Falls. Even though it appears to be part of the same system, it is actually a waterfall where another river – the Little River – joins the St. John River wherefrom comes the Grand Falls when the water flows over the dam in the spring.

Tomorrow we continue south and east to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick, where we plan to spend two nights.

Our destination today was Montmagny which is located on the south side of the St. Lawrence River and further east than Quebec City on the north side. Once again we skipped all the major highways and followed a roadmap route winding through country municipalities and small towns. We drove almost all day through gorgeous farm country – mostly dairy farms. And we went up and down some VERY steep hills – as in 8% -14% grades.

We drove north of Sherbrooke first to the town of Windsor where there was a building still surviving from an old powder mill – as in black powder for explosions and guns. I was hoping there would be information plaques or a brochure available but there was only the empty building. The property is now a popular hiking area and the lady at the desk just collects a fee to use the trails. She let us in for half price because we only wanted to walk down to the bridge that we could see from the mill building.

Look closely at the picture above. You can just make out a smooth water line a tiny bit below the bridge. It is like the edge of an infinity pool, completely straight, no ripples or waves. This is because there is a sloped concrete wall for the water to flow over which creates a smooth waterfall.

Since there was no information about the powder mill available at the site I found this write-up on the Township Heritage Webmagazine: “Three components make up the explosive combination of black powder: saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulphur, and charcoal (carbon). In its heyday, black powder had two primary applications: blasting powder for use in mining operations, and gunpowder for hunting. In 1864, three American entrepreneurs, Thomas Sheldon, Seth Andrews, and Jarvis Marble, decided they would profit from the mining boom that was happening in the Eastern Townships. They established a powder mill in Windsor, on the banks of the Watopeka River, calling it “Sheldon, Andrews, & Company” Over the next half-century, the mill would change hands, and expand in size, several times.

In 1869, with the arrival of a Montreal businessman, George Davies Ferrier, the mill became the “Windsor Powder Company.” It manufactured both blasting powder and gunpowder. In 1873, the mill became the first in Canada to manufacture dynamite, a powerful nitroglycerine-based explosive. Purchased by the “Hamilton Powder Company” in 1877, the facility comprised some forty buildings. Bought in 1911 by “Canadian Explosives Ltd.,” it underwent a number of modifications to both its product line and equipment. By the end of the First World War, the operation had grown to fifty-six buildings, an enormous complex.

In 1922, a violent explosion rocked the facility, killing a number of workers. This was not the first such accident (since opening, twenty workers had lost their lives on the job). It would, however, be the last. The plant closed its doors that same year.”

We saw a sign indicating there was a viewpoint a kilometer up the road so we pulled in even though the sky was low and we did not expect to see far. We had been driving through rain since leaving Sherbrooke and even though it had stopped the clouds had not risen much.

Who cares if you can’t see a view. Isn’t this the most awesome viewpoint you have ever seen?

The view of the distant hill was indeed negligible and not worth photographing but it made a cute image between the ears.

Just before the main town of Thetford Mines is a suburb-sort of town called Black Lake. It actually refers to the groundwater that has filled a massive open pit asbestos mine. I managed to snap a photo from the road as we drove by.

The most amazing thing were the mountains of tailings from the many mines. They stretched for a long distance out of the two towns in all directions. This area had the largest high-grade pocket of serpentine ore in the world. (You break the serpentine to extract the chrysotile asbestos fiber.)

We managed to find a viewing platform in Black Lake that overlooked the Black Lake and had good information boards. I have attached photos and text from them in this blog because the story is so amazing.

How horribly heartbreaking for the community to see their beautiflul church turned into rubble!

Because the lake has been created from groundwater, rain, and snow melt there are no impurities as would be the case if there were input and output water access. This makes it look a lovely turquoise when the sun is out. Crater Lake in Oregon is the same and on a sunny day it is a gorgeous sapphire. We were not blessed with a clear sky but there were enough breaks in the clouds to show some of the colour.

We arrived in Montmagny at 4:30. Tomorrow we spend the night in Grand Falls, New Brunswick.

Today was primarily a driving day. There were not a lot of things to see along the way and we avoided the major highway and drove along lots of country roads through many towns, farms, orchards and vineyards.

We only made three short stops. First was into the parking lot of a Roman Catholic Church that had a really tall spire in Cornwall, ON. We also noticed a historic marker half hidden in the plants on the side of the hall building.

The church turned out to be the oldest remaining stone structure in Ontario. It was built in 1801.

We crossed the street to check out the historic cemetery and find the grave of Simon Fraser, whom we learned all about in elementary school history and geography.

Simon Fraser’s wife was a MacDonell. The historic marker we noticed beside the church spoke of an early settler named MacDonell who arrived from America with his father and the rest of his family. The cemetery was full of the graves of MacDonell’s. They were Loyalists and received land for their military service against the Americans

The marker says he was ‘killed by the falling of a tree’ in 1799. This is the oldest tombstone in the cemetery that is still legible.

This is a replica of the first Roman Catholic church that was built on this site in 1784.

There was a low stone wall around the cemetery and a plaque that said that it had been restored in 2007 with financial assistance from the Province of Ontairo, the Hudson’s Bay History Foundation (many of the people buried here would have been fur trappers and traders for the Hudson’s Bay Co.), Simon Fraser University (in BC) and many private donations from the community of Cornwall. I thought it interesting that the University in British Columbia that bears his name would send money to Quebec to help restore a wall around Fraser’s burial site.

Our second stop was a bit of a detour. While passing through LaColle we went 8 km off our route to drive up to Fort Lennox National Historic Site. We were able to go into the visitor’s center but the actual site of the fort was closed for restoration. It was planned to be re-opened in 2020 but Covid hit and that delayed the work for two years. Tentative opening is now next summer. The Fort is on an island and when it is open you can take a boat from the Visitor’s Center over to see it. The restorations will be quite extensive to the original buildings to repair foundations and deteriorating stone blocks and fix old windows.

The French built a wooden fort on the island to protect themselves against a possible British invasion via Lake Champlain during the Seven Years War in 1759. Britain took the fort after a 12-day seige 1760 and promptly abandoned it because there was no longer a threat. After the Americans attempted to capture Quebec City in 1775-1776 they retreated to Lake Champlain so the British, worried about another attempt, built a fort that was smaller than the French original. Between 1819 and 1829 a few hundred soldiers and workers built Fort Lennox. All of the buildings on the site are the original ones from that time. The Fort was surrounded by a Star moat.

This is as much as we could see of it across the water with a zoom lens.

The Fort Lennox Visitor’s Center was at the end of a spit of land that jutted between two waterways with houses and many beautiful boats.

We backtracked the 8 kilometers back to our required road but made a quick photo stop at an old wooden Blockhouse located almost at the junction.

These two churches were side by side at a road junction. I did not have time to see the denomination of the one above. The one below is Baptist.

We were on a narrow winding road and there was no traffic so when we saw this lovely reflection we just stopped and took a couple of photos.

Most of the roads we drove today were normal two-lane roads but for about 20 km were on this one that was quite narrow and had lots of turns. The road had been prepped for re-surfacing so was pretty rough, otherwise it would have been a great motorcycle road. I bet the local bikers like it.

We arrived in Sherbrooke at 5:30, checked in to our hotel and headed down the road to find a restuarant for dinner. At the time of this writing we have not decided where we will spend tomorrow night.

We had a really nice day today. The weather was awesome; nice and warm. We drove over to the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, but it looked like a nice green space with lots of big trees. We did not see any flower gardens so headed off to our chosen second place of the day.

The Billings Estate Historic Site is the home of the first settlers in Glouchester Township. They came north from the USA based on the promise of free land in Upper Canada. Braddish & Lamira were newly married when they arrived in 1813. He was 30. She was 17.

With hard work and determination they raised seven children and built a prosperous farming enterprise. Five generations of the family lived here and when the last of the Billings moved away local heritage groups and the City of Ottawa saved the house and the remaining land. Over the years they had built the property until it encompassed 1200 acres.

They had nine children but Cynthia died after a lengthy painful illness at age 3. They still have the letter Lamira wrote to Braddish telling him of the death of his daughter. They also had a son who died at ten months.

As they increased their holdings they had a sawmill and the farm raised produce which was sold at Byword market as well as eggs, cream, butter, and cheese. Many of their children pursued careers and interests outside of the family farm but the Billings estate would remain in the family for almost 150 years.

The family was very philanthropic. They donated land for a school, and a hospital, and financed the building of them. They contributed to the construction of a bridge that enable the growing community to easily get their produce and products to the market. Lamira built a church and two of her daughters also financed the construction of churches. Braddish acted as an unofficial banker and supplied land and financing for the first post office and general store. He leased land and loaned money to other area residents. Between 1825 and 1850 Braddish filled a number of leadership roles in the community, including warden. town clerk, assessor, collector, pound-keeper, overseer of highways, councilor and justice of the peace.

A very industrious, community minded family that included a son who was Canada’s first paleantologist, a proflific scientific writer, who discovered 60 new genera and over 1000 new species of fossils – which made him world famous. Two of his sons were architects and amateur paleantologists as well and one of them donated his fossils to the British Museum. Braddish II founded the Botanical Society of Canada and was vice-president of the Entomological Society of Canada. He identified 2000 species of plants in the Prescott area alone. Some of his collections went to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Another son was a geologist and enginner. Even the females in the family had careers. It was two of the daughters that continued to run the farm and businesses after Braddish and Lamira died. Of the 14 women in the family generations only three of them ever married.

The estate contains the oldest cemetery in Ottawa. The original gravestones deteriorated over time and were replaced in the 1930s with these white marble ones. Most of them have a weeping willow at the top as a symbol of sorrow and eternal life. Some are cracked and have been repaired so they have all been brought to this building to preserve them and small markers are now in the cemetery.

On the window at the ticket counter at the Billings Estate was poster for a Vintage car show at the Cumberland Heritage Village. All pre-1940 vehicles. We had lots of time before we had to be at John’s cousin’s so we got directions from Google and off we went.

It was a large park with many buildings that have been moved to the site from the surrounding area since the mid-1970s. The cars were all in a large grassy area at the park entrance. The car owners would take turns pulling out of their display spot and drive the big loop road in the park. And they often would offer rides to children or adults. Very cool.

We wandered past a few cars, then checked out a few buildings, then a few cars, then a few buildings until we had seen them all.

The cars were displayed clockwise around the lawn with the oldest being the REO on the left of the photo above. I did not take note of models, makes or year of any of the cars. Nor did I photograph every one of them.

Knox Church of Vars. It was a Presbyterian Church from 1904 until union with the Methodist Church in 1925 to become the United Church. The church, complete with furnishings and stained glass windows was decommissioned and moved to the village museum in 1977.

I loved this gorgeous Mercedes-Benz.

This is the most modern house in the museum. It is the Foubert house of 1915 and was a kit house ordered from a catalogue.

The Grier-Spratt House of 1857 and the Cumberland School. The house was originally owned by Anabel Foubert, one of the first settlers in the Village of Cumberland and later the home of the Griers and then the Spratts. For a brief time in the 1860s the house was the home of Dr. James Ferguson, the community’s first medical practitioner. It was disassembled and moved here in 1977.

The French Hill school built in 1900. Nearly 40 students, French and English speaking, in one room, grades 1-8, received a very British education with French taught as a subject. When a French school was built all the French-speaking children moved to that school. Throughout its use it was never equipped with electricity or plumbing. There were two outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls. The school was closed in 1936 and remained empty until it was moved to the museum.

The front of the Grier-Spratt house.

This tiny little house sat on St. Joseph Boulevard in the center of Orleans until the owner willed it to the museum in 1984. It is a one and a half story house with one room on the main floor that served as kitchen, dining and sitting room and a bedroom in the half attic. The house never had electricity or running water or plumbing. Built in 1820 it was originally located on 200 acres of land owned by Francois Dupuis, a former member of the Regiment des Voyageurs and one of the first settlers in the area. The house served four generations of the Dupuis family.

As we were walking back to our truck we stopped to chat to a fellow at the gate and during our conversation he suddenly stopped and looked to the sky and said, “Here’s our bi-plane.” Apparently someone at the village knew some who knew someone who had a 1938 bi-plane and was attending some function nearby. He agreed to do a couple of flying loops over the car show area. The era of his plane fit right in with the vintage cars.

We drove back to our room at the University of Ottawa and I sorted and edited photos until it was ready to head over to John’s counsin’s for another dinner and visit. We had a great day.

Tomorrow we leave Ottawa and drive down to Cornwall before crossing the St. Lawrence River and heading to Sherbrooke, Quebec for the night. We have really enjoyed our four days in Ottawa. There are still sites to see here so we may have to come back.

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.

Each case displayed examples of the different classification of minerals.

We have seen a lot of walls of basalt columns in our various travels, the largest of which is the amazing Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

Gold, gold, and more gold in all its different mineral incarnations.

Pyrite natually forms perfect cubes.

I liked this one. It is a very soft mossy green and looks like a rock covered with mold.

Gypsum, like several other minerals forms long arms.

We had lunch at about 3 and headed back to our room to enjoy our weekly video chat with our son and his wife and daughter.

As promised yesterday there are flowers today. It was time to go to a garden. We drove out to Maplelawn and wandered around thier English Garden. It is cared for by volunteers, I think, and was a lot ‘bushier’ than most manicured walled gardens in Britain, but it was really nice to just stroll among the colours and photograph the fleurs.

You can’t tour the house unfortunately and part of it is a Keg restaurant.

The garden was laid out in the typical box format with bisecting X paths and a central floral/fountain feature.

I impressed myself with the number of blooms I could identify as I am not a gardener even though I love flowers. The ones I did not know Google Lens identified for me. This partially-open Beebalm was one of them.

My dad showed my sisters and I how to connect a bud to a blossom and make a ‘lady’ with Hollyhock blossoms.

Google Lens did not identify this one for me.

Maplelawn wasn’t very big so we drove to the Experimental Farm that is situated in the middle of Ottawa and wandered around the Ornamental Garden as we had planned to do the day before.

Clearly the Hosta are happy in this location.

It was only about 1:30 when we finished walking around the Ornamental Garden so we went into town to tour the Royal Canadian Mint. Because Rogers Telecommunication had some huge glitch in their system and the internet was out nation-wide, we had free parking and free admittance to the Mint.

We toured the mint in Winnepeg on our first drive across the country in 2014. All of our circulation coins, plus coins for dozens of other countries are made there. (Canada is an innovator in the manufacture of high quality coinage and we get contracts from many nations to make their coins.)

The Mint in Ottawa makes all the specialty coins, medallians and tokens and items like the 2010 Olympic medals and all military medals. They use silver, gold, and platinum. Many of the machines have been designed and patented by the Royal Canadian Mint. It was no surprise that no photos were allowed.

The other major manufacturer of coinage is Australia and our guide told us there are literally thousands of lawsuits back and forth arguing about who developed what technique or equipment first. Currently Canada is winning the most. Quite a few years ago when Australia wanted to become a world leader in coins they got contracts from so many countries they had no time to make their own coins so they contracted Canada to do it. All the coins were immediately bought by collectors and never reached circulation so Australia did not do that again.

To make the coins they cut ingots into three pieces and melt them, then run the melted metal on narrow conveyors and spray it with room temperature water to cool it before coiling it into large rounds. A round of gold is worth $43,000,000 on today’s gold market. The face value of the coins made from it will be much less.

The rounds are then fed through cutters to make the proper-size circles before being edged (which makes them last much longer if they are in circulation), buffed, weighed and stamped. Every gold and platinum coin is individually weighed and any extra metal is shaved off. All the left-over pieces from the molds and the slivers shaved are all put back in the melting pot and reused for coins.

The silver coins are machine stamped by one of two machines – one of which is rated 100% accurate and the other is 99.999999….% accurate because they purposefully made an error with it for a test so it can no longer be rated 100%. The gold and platinum coins are individually stamped by a person. Each station had an image of the coin currently being made by that person. These are not general circulation coins, they are purchased by collectors or persons or companies with an interest in the image or history imprinted, and investors. These are $20.00, $50.00 or $100.00 (or larger) commemorative coins. These coins actually have a small stamp of a maple leaf on them with their DNA. Recorded is the date it was made, the time it was stamped – to the second, it’s inspection time, which stamper imprinted it, etc. Every detail about every individual coin is recorded on it.

The Mint website says: “The most secure bullion coins in the world, our Gold and Silver Maple Leaf bullion coins are universal symbols of innovation, ingenuity and excellence. The beautiful design and purity of our bullion is instantly recognized by dealers and investors worldwide.”

We saw the mold for the $100,000 coin they made of .59 gold. Canada created this virtually pure form of gold and are the only country in the world to do so. 24-carart gold, 14-carat gold and all the gold we use for jewellry and things has additives in it. Normal ‘pure’ gold coins in Canada and elsewhere in the world are. 49. .59 had never been done. The .59 $100,000 coin was the size of a large pizza. The mold can still be used to make more if they choose.

Canada was first to make many other special coins like the “Poppy” quarter for Remembrance Day that has a red poppy on it, they made a quarter with the Northern Lights that acutally glows in the dark (they have become worth about $10.00), and special coins with Swarovski crystals on them, ceramic images and many other things.

The largest coin by far was the mold for the million-dollar coin – called the Big Maple Leaf. The only country to make such a thing. In 2007 they made 6 of them and they were huge – about 2 feet across and weighed 100 kilograms (220 lbs). They are 999.99/1000 percent pure gold. The original is still at the mint, two others are elsewhere in Canada and three were bought by people overseas. One by a man in Austria who has loaned it to a museum, one by a fellow in Germany that also loaned his to a museum in Berlin were it was promptly stolen three months later and has never been found (the thieves were caught, tried and sentenced but it is suspected the coin was melted down) and one was bought by a fellow in Dubai that had it encased in glass and made into a coffee table. Each of them sold for over $2 million when offered and are now worth over $8 million. The Big Maple Leaf remained the largest gold coin ever minted until 2011, when the 1 tonne Austrailain Gold Nugget (“Gold Kangaroo”) was minted.

You could stand in front of this image of an open vault and lift the pure silver ingot for a photo-op. They, like the Mint in Winnepeg, also have a gold ingot but they did not have enough security on staff today to have the gold one out. Even though the ingot is bolted to a base, when the gold one is on display a guard stands beside it at all times.

We went back to our dorm room at Ottawa University and since there was still no internet I just my sorted photos until we left to go to John’s cousin’s house for a family BBQ.