Today we visited a tank. But first, we had to get there. The preferred route to London is to take the 400 into Toronto, then the 401 out to London, but I had no desire to do that. There are secondary highways all throughout this area of Ontario, but they all radiate out from the GTA area towards the coast, so none of them go southwest.
Google offers a route bypassing the big highways, but we quickly discovered that there is a problem with Google maps and rural Ontario. All the roads are paved, two lane highways that have an 80 km/h speed limit, so there is no reason for Google to favor any one over another. However, the roads include actual highways, smaller roads and even access roads to farms, and Google took us over all of them. Early on, I gave up on using Google as it was taking us on tiny roads, turning every 6km, but we quickly missed the turn off we were supposed to take and ended up going the wrong direction, so back to the weird route it was.
We did see a lot of rural Ontario. Lots of corn crops, some wheat crops (which is almost ready to harvest at the end of July!), and the odd tractor or two. We finally arrived in London after 1pm and headed to the 1st Hussars museum. However, the main road towards the park the museum was in was closed by construction, and Google was unaware of that. We ended up finding our own way into the park and parking in a pay parking lot. After lunch in the park, we explored the museum, which is tiny, but I've wanted to go to it for some time - the 1st Hussars were the armored regiment that landed on the D-Day beaches with the Regina Rifles (and Royal Winnipeg Rifles). There were some nice displays and a very helpful worker, whom we probably should have asked more questions of, since it was obvious that he knew a lot and that no one came to the museum.
After leaving the museum, we then took a very long and hot walk to Victoria Park to see the tank - Holy Roller. Holy Roller is one of the few tanks that landed on the D-Day beaches and survived until the end of the war. (We will actually get to see a second one - Bomb - later on in the trip.) All the pictures I had seen online of the tank were of it in pretty rough condition, but apparently the City of London restored it last year, so it was sitting in the park, fully painted. We explored around the tank for awhile and then walked back to the car. Leaving London required us to get on the 401, which was much like the freeways in Florida. Full of cars driving way too fast. Luckily, we were going to Hamilton, so we got to break off onto the 403, which is a smaller and less busy highway.
We soon arrived at Brantford so that we could stop at Wayne Gretzky's childhood home for Sandra. I think it is now owned by someone else, as there was a car in the driveway, but we stopped out front and Sandra darted across the street for a picture. Our final destination of the day was Hamilton, where we are staying in a small house for the next couple of days, primarily so that we can take Bradley to Niagara Falls, as that is one the places he wanted to go on this trip. So, that is our destination tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment