Maritimes - Day 8

Today started off slowly, as we weren't in any rush to leave Hamilton.  We were headed to the Ontario Regiment Museum in Oshawa, but it didn't open until noon and it was only an hour and a half drive.  We did have to leave the house by 10:00am, so we were on the road by 9:30am.  We stopped at a nearby donut shop to pick up donuts for lunch and then drove through Toronto to Oshawa.  I chose the toll highway, even though it would cost us, just to avoid the traffic on the QEW and whatever highway goes into Toronto from Burlington, because the QEW was insane.  Frankly, the toll highway was pretty busy, and it was five lanes wide as it went through Toronto.

We arrived at the museum just after 11:00am, ate our lunch and sat for a bit before entering the museum.  It has a small regular museum section, with a good collection of historical weapons, and some interesting information regarding the real guns that were used as the starting point for famous Star Wars weapons.

After that, you head into the garage area where they keep and work on all of their tanks.  This museum is home to the largest collection of runnable tanks in the world, and they run them on a regular basis - just not today, unfortunately.  For display, they are parked side by side in the garage, so you can't get around and see some of the tanks very well, but it was still cool to see what you could.  Alex really enjoyed the museum, especially as this was one of the things that he wanted to do on the trip.

They also had a few tanks out in the lot beside the garage, and you could go out and see them if you had one of the museum volunteers as a guide, so Alex, Jonathan and I went out and learned a bit about the tanks that were out there, before returning and looking at a few more things in the museum.

Once done, we were back on the road and headed down the 401 towards Quebec.  We made it as far as Brockville, ON, which is fine, as we have a place to stay for the next couple of nights in Sherbrooke, QC and that is only about 3.5 hours from here.

I wish we had spent a little more time researching what there was to do around here before we left, as Brockville has a dirt racetrack and they were running races tonight.  It would have been awesome to take Evan to, but we didn't find out about it until it was too late.  Instead, I took the kids to the pool and then we retired for the night.  À demain.