(Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

My previous post talked about our trip to the Supreme Court of Canada, but that wasn’t the only national site we visited on December 29.  We also braved the snows to take a tour of the Royal Canadian Mint.

The Royal Canadian Mint actually has two locations now.  The original facility in Ottawa now produces only special commemorative and investment coins, while the newer facility in Winnipeg now handles the minting of the standard everyday coinage.   The upside of this is that you get to see some seriously valuable metal in Ottawa, as virtually everything is made of silver or gold.  It also produces specialty items, such as the medals awarded during the 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2015 Pan-Am Games.

After the tour, we were able to lift a gold bar worth about $680,000.00.  It is securely attached and under the watchful eyes of two security guards; it is also a lot heavier than you’d expect!  The tour is not long but it is also not that expensive; however, you do need to sign up in advance so that you are able to go through the guard post at the entrance to the facility.  Unfortunately, no photographs are permitted during the tour itself.

As we had both previously been on tours of the Parliament Buildings, we weren’t too disappointed to find out that the day’s tours were already fully booked by the time we got there.  You can only get tickets on the day of the tour; as a result, there are often line-ups first thing in the morning and all of the day’s tickets were gone by 10:30 a.m.  If the timing works for us, we will try to take one of these tours the next time we are in Ottawa.

That evening, we went to a family-run Persian restaurant called “Saffron” in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood.  It was not fancy but we really enjoyed the food.  They were very accommodating and even suggested that my wife order something that was not on the menu.

The previous day, we spent an entire afternoon at the Canadian War Museum.  It is huge:  there are 4 separate halls plus a large temporary exhibit area:  we were there for about three hours and only saw the “Cold War” hall and the temporary exhibit on Women in War.

The Cold War hall focused naturally on the period between World War II and the early 1990s.  It is strange to walk through a museum and see things that you actually remember being part of your own life:  for us, seeing the small display of “Cold War music videos from the 1980s” was especially poignant as we remember when these songs and videos first came out.

I spent some time at the Cold War Simulator, watching the two “best guesses” of how a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact might have unfolded.  Even though these were only simulations, it was still very scary to see a desperate, last-ditch use of chemical weapons followed by a single retaliatory nuclear strike.

My next major trip is now less than 2 months away; I’ve been very busy with finalizing those arrangements and doing the “macro planning” for this summer’s southern hemisphere journey.  Stay tuned for more on those trips and some more travel flashbacks!