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!

Honey

On a nice sunny day we helped my parents take the honey from the bees.

After all the frames (full of honey) are collected we move into my uncles old milk parlour to begin extracting the honey. First the caps have to be removed from all the honeycomb.

After the caps are removed, the honey can be spun out of the comb using a centrifugal extractor.

We finished the first day of work with dinner with my relatives.

Lily enjoyed her first spaghetti meal, which made a huge mess even though she was spoon fed! She even got it in her hair!

A day at the zoo

On the weekend we went to the zoo with some friends from my Ph.D. We saw the baby panda's and took the zoomobile around the park. Lily had a good time and some good naps in her stroller.

Montreal and Baby Shower

We made a long weekend trip and headed up to Montreal, a 8 hour car ride! We took almost the whole day to drive there, taking breaks at the ONRoutes along the way (car stops with bathrooms, food and picnic areas). When we arrived at our apartment I joked to Michael that our new van would be vandalized because we were in Quebec with Ontario plates. Unfortunately I was right and by the end of the weekend someone had burned the back of our van with a cigarette centered right in the middle under the license plate. :-(

Other than the van being vandalized we had a nice weekend. On the first evening we went out for a great dinner near downtown and in the heat we finished the evening with very delicious chocolate dipped soft serve ice cream. Very yummy!

On the Saturday I attended my cousins shower while Mic spent the day with his friend at the adventure park. Lily is starting to move around, however at the party people had tied ribbons as decoration to the coffee table. Lily was in love and didn't move from that ribbon for hours! To keep things interesting I attached the screw lid from her food squeezy and she was entertained all day. To help her nap we would bounce her in her bouncy chair and she fell asleep holding that ribbon and lid clutched close to her!

On our way back we broke up the drive with a stop in Prince Edward County on Lake Erie. We stopped at a winery and enjoyed our rest. Lily fell asleep shortly after we left and slept the rest of the ride home so we all had a good return trip!