Epic East Coast - Day 43

Sweet, glorious coolness!  For the first time since we left home 43 days ago, the temperature did not get above 25 degrees.  It hit 24 late in the morning and then the arrival of afternoon rain showers knocked that down to 19 when we walked back to the hotel for supper.  That was the nicest walk I've had in a long time.

Everyone slept in this morning, so we simply booked a tour of the mint at 11:00am, which we ended up having to rush to after struggling to get everyone out of the hotel.  Also, this hotel has extremely busy elevators - I've never had to wait so long for an elevator before.  Anyway, we walked very quickly and got to the mint in time for our tour.  The tour was very interesting, as was seeing the giant coils of pure gold and silver used to make the coins.  Each gold coil is worth 22 million dollars and the one room had 12 of them sitting side by side.  No pictures were allowed on the tour, though there were lots of cool things to take pictures of.  Probably the most interesting thing we learned was that each medal from the Vancouver Olympics has a unique pattern on it, as the medals are all pieces in a puzzle.  If you put them all together correctly it forms a picture of an orca.  Each athlete was presented with a scarf that showed where their medal fit into the puzzle.

We left the mint and took a quick look at the nearby cathedral before heading back to the hotel for lunch.  After lunch, we walked across the bridge to Quebec and went to the Canadian History Museum.  I picked it because I was worried we would not have time to explore the entire War Museum in part of an afternoon, which is where Alex and I both really want to go.  However, I did not do enough research into the museum, as I expected it to have things of importance to Canadians - like Alexander Graham Bell or the trans-Canada railway.  That floor is being worked on and will open next year.  What it did have was a entire floor on indigenous people and a floor of special exhibitions.  The first floor was poorly lit and difficult to see things and the younger kids found the masks and totem poles scary.  The special exhibitions were decent - one on Napoleon and one on the BC gold rush.

The star of the museum was the children's section, which we went to last.  A bunch of different areas for the kids to play in - pretending to cook, run a crane on a boat, building a house and so on.  We let the kids run and play for a couple of hours while we waited for the rain to stop so that we could walk home.  As mentioned previously, I loved the walk, though some of the others found it too cold.  I have a feeling we're going to be bundled up once we get back to Regina.

He rebuilt this plumbing six times.

Don't show this to Papa!