Ottawa offered too many choices of places to visit on one single rest day. It is similar to Washington, DC, in that it had many fine national museums. Among them were the National Art Gallery, the new War Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, and even more. Parliament and the Canadian Mint also offered tours. One could spend a week of rest days in Ottawa without seeing everything on offer.
This is a sign posted in our campground.
Rideau Palace is used by the ceremonial governor, the representative of Queen Elizabeth II. I suspect it is also used to house visiting royals who visit the former colony also. I was unable to get a photo of the palace. All of these sites are spread out and I was on foot while visiting.
Street signs here were bi-lingual.
Since we have some exposure to Canadian wildlife while riding, I chose to visit the Museum of Nature today. It was primarily set up for children, but was still interesting. Here we learned, in both English and French, that the planet is still in an ice age, because both poles are covered with ice year round.
This display portrayed a polar bear hunting seal through a hole in the ice, in other words, for my Minnesota friends and relatives, he was ice fishing.
The beaver is a very popular Canadian mammal, and the tail is fascinating.
Caribou, a/k/a reindeer displayed here. Note the long horns and the distinct coloring.
It is doubtful that we will see either caribou, or musk oxen like those below, as both species inhabit lands further north. While musk oxen look "prehistoric", they are quite contemporary.
While we did finally see a moose cow on our route here, no one has yet seen a bull like the specimen shown below. Hopefully we will have another chance to see a big fellow like this when we get to Newfoundland.
I mentioned earlier in this blog that we rode along the Rideau Canal System en route to Ottawa. Here is the canal in Ottawa, and the end of the system connecting Kingston and Ottawa. It is quite attractive here.
As Ottawa is the capitol of Canada, I captured a photo of the Canadian Parliament building.
Tomorrow we mount up and head to Carillon, Quebec. Come back to see how we fare in the French speaking province.
No comments:
Post a Comment