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Published: July 16th 2018
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We pulled out of camp at 9:30 into a cool morning—62 degrees with clear blue skies and the wind blowing. Our first stop was at the Canadian Mint where we promptly signed up to take a tour at 10:00.
The tour was interesting and had a larger crowd than we would have thought on a Monday morning. Everyone was quite respectful to the docent who walked us through the area so we could all hear what she was saying. The Canadian Mint has contracts with over 72 countries throughout the world, including the US. They do NOT mint coins for us, however, they do supply some of the blanks we use to mint our coins in the States at one of our four mints. They do a lot of specialty coins, such as the Olympic Medals, painted coins (truly), and special event commemorative coins. They even did 5 HUGE coins a few years ago that were solid gold weighing in at several pounds (apparently the size of a small round table and several inches thick) that were minted in the denomination of $1,000,000! The Sultan of Dubai apparently bought one—he is the fellow who made it into a table! The
other four were anonymous.
While at the mint, I saw a cute T-shirt on a little girl who appeared to be maybe 8 years old. It said, “Excuse me, I have to go out and be awesome.” That is the “sign of the day”!
We left the mint at 11:00 heading up Trans Canada 1 to Kenora, Ontario. By this time, it was getting a little cloudy and the temp clocked in at 67. We were loving it!
Judy—I hate to bring this topic up one more time, but we passed an area that said it was the LONGITUDINAL center of Canada!! Who spends the time to think this stuff up??
Passing into Ontario Province at 1:45 we started to see signs of the Canadian Shield.
“The Canadian Shield is a large area of exposed Precambrian Igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks (old rocks!) that forms the ancient geological core of the North American continent. Composed of igneous rock resulting from its long volcanic history, the area is covered by a thin layer of soil. It stretches north from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, covering over half of Canada.”
We passed high rock
walls of this shield (along what turned from Trans Canada 1 into Trans Canada 17) which are just amazing. You could see their basalt features as they broke off into sharply angled pieces. There were lots and lots of cairns along the road on top of the rocks which stand for “The Traveler” in this part of the world. Fun! We made one once when we were on the Top of the World Highway on the way to Alaska in 1997. Wonder if it is still there??
As I write this, a light fog is starting to roll in over the beautiful scene of water and evergreens that we are looking at from our perch inside Mufasa. If you look closely at the last picture today, you can see some of it in the air. The air temperature feels cool, which I am sure we will miss when we get home.
Tomorrow we may pull down the road a few miles and stay in one of the usually very nice Provincial Parks. If not, we will continue to drop south to get back into the states at the Minnesota border. If not then, we will do our border
crossing the next day.
We drove 138 miles today.
PS—A factoid: This is Ontario, Canada’s 150 year anniversary of the Ontario Parks system. There are over 330 provincial parks in Ontario which encompasses over 8.2 million hectares of land and water—or 7.7 percent of Ontario Province! These are people that are committed to their provincial and national park system and it shows!
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Mike
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Scenery
Enjoyed your pictures of the lake and woods. Reminds me of when Kim and I would drive from the Maine coast back to NY on secondary roads through the woods and lakes of Maine, NY, and Vermont. Back in the pre-kids era.