Lily's First Birthday

Lily celebrated her first birthday and the family came to celebrate with her.

For her birthday Mic and I made Lily a busy board for her to play with. Or as my cousins noted, teach her how to open everything. Lily had a giant ice cream cake but it wasn't big enough and Mic and I didn't get a slice (although Lily enjoyed her entire piece on her own). We went out and bought a second cake the next day...

Halloween

Lily celebrated her first Halloween in Canada (while Carly tutored several high school students in science). We found a great costume at Costco for her, very cute and nice and warm! In addition to missing her cousins visiting (she was having a nap) Lily also went to the local Early Years Centre for the party where she once again played in the ball pit.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in Ontario! All the family got together at my aunt's house and we had a great big meal. Lily had lots of fun playing with her cousins and with all the new toys. Lily loves to check out anything new so she had a great time with all the new stuff and all the new people running around.

Fokke and Tineke were also there while they were visiting Canada.

Stratford Fall Fair

On the weekend we visited the Stratford Fall Fair. There were lots of animals and we were too late to see all the prize winning vegetables and pies.

Lily got to pet the baby chickens and we watched a sheep being sheared by hand.

Plowing Match

On a beautiful fall day - although it doesn't seem like summer has really ended yet - we went to the plowing match near Palmerston. It is a celebration of rural life and has lots of equipment and stuff on display as well as shows and music. And a plowing competition which I wanted to see but we were so busy all day we didn't get to it.

The big thing I wanted to check out was the RCMP musical ride - a horse riding demonstration of formations done to music by mounted police of Canada. We had a long wait to ensure we had good seats and Lily was a big squirmer. Lucky for us there was a lovely family behind us with a big man with a big beard who was happy to hold Lily and she was happy to sit still and look.

After the musical ride we checked out the booths, the quilts, and the old tractors and by the time we had walked around the day was over! I don't even think we saw half of the plowing match!

Wellesley Applebutter Festival

A beautiful fall day and we went with my friend Max to the Wellesley Applebutter festival. The town is famous for having a factory that makes applebutter and apple cider.

We toured the factory and checked out the food vendors and the arts and crafts sections. It was a beautiful day!

Algonquin Eastern Pines Trail

After our trip to Ottawa we went back packing on the Eastern Pines Trail in Algonquin Provincial Park. This is a series of loop trails which reach as far as High Falls (unless you take the 1 hour High Falls Cheater trail which is unmarked on any official maps). We entered the park at the east gate and parked at Achray. With one person carrying the baby and some gear and the other person all the rest of the gear it was a heavy load. Good thing it was mostly flat because we were loaded down!

We had fantastic weather the entire trip. We walked by a few lakes and camped on the shore of Stratton Lake. It was a good thing we were on the lake because the mosquitoes weren't that bad. In the forest they were annoying and sometimes you were always swatting away (although I got out with on a few bites). Apparently this is outside of mosquito season and I would hate to see it in July! Out campsite was lovely, right on the lake and a wire was strung for us to hang our food pack from to keep it away from any bears.

We headed back into the forest to check out High Falls, dodging mosquitoes the entire way. The falls were lovely, there were pools of water to swim in (jumping in from the high rocks surrounding the pool).

And there were also rock waterslides to slide down from one pool to the other.

In the evening we cooked on my little Trangia stove (nice and quiet but not very fuel efficient) and ate really old Sidekicks dinner that I never should have packed. No more kitchen and bottles of wine with dinner like hiking in Switzerland! We carried diapers in and carried full diapers out, good thing we were only hiking for two days and one night.

During the night we listened to the loons as we crammed into my tiny two person backpacking tent. It's a nice light tent that's fine for two people but definitely too small for two adults and a baby. We survived the night though and it is time for me to consider another tent.... hopefully the next trips will be by canoe where we can carry heavier gear without much trouble.

The next day we hiked out and were out of the woods pretty quickly. We didn't see much wildlife on the entire trip but paused to take a photo at the beaver dam and lodge at the start of the trail.

After we finished the trail we weren't done hiking yet. Next up was a short 1.6km loop to look down over the Barron Canyon.

And what a look it was! When the glaciers were still covering the continent the water would flow south to the Mississppi. As the ice receded lower exit points were revealed and the water instead flowed out to the Atlantic. At one point the Barron Canyon was an exit and at the high point would have carried the water of 100 Niagara Falls', which dug out the canyon that we could see today.

Ottawa

In yet another trip across the province (well, half the province) we went to Ottawa and Pembroke for tourism and the fiddle contest. The weather here in Canada continues to be fantastic although we spent a lot of the trip indoors in museums.

First up was a visit to see the capitol buildings and the eternal flame.

 

 

  We watched the sun set over the Rideau canal, and Lily gave an excellent look at the camera.

 

The next day we went to the Natural History museum which had a cool dinosaur display. I never really thought about it before but Pangaea wasn't that early in the history of the earth, only ~300 million years ago compared to the Earth's 4500 million years. At the museum they had an exhibit of dinosaurs after the breakup of Pangaea where the dinosaur's on the Southern continent (the topic of the exhibit) diverged from those on the Northern.

Here is Lily with the Tyrannosaur skull for comparison.

Among all the other cool dinosaurs there was this little crocodile that was an herbivore.

And Lily and I with a triceratops (I think).

Then we visited the Air and Space Museum because they also had a Star Trek exhibition. We looked at all the old planes (which took longer than expected) and tried out the motion capture video game dogfight.

They also had a space section, with the Canadarm and this space suit (Lily enjoyed her nap).

After hours in the museum we headed to the Star Trek exhibit. They had some cute hands on activities and lots of quizes and tests to take. According to the quizzes I am all set up for command, followed by Science and I sucked at Klingon...

I had my photo taken with some of the outfits from the show. The detail and quality on them was much higher than I expected from watching the show. On the show Picard's outfit looked like something cheap and flimsy but in real life it appeared to be a lot heavier.

At the end they also had the bridge of the Enterprise and I got my picture taken in the captains chair.

Lily - don't you know there are no children on the bridge!