Weekend Break

We spent the weekend in Barrie again, just to double check that we might want to live there.  I have taken lots of photos so please be patient.

As usual we visited lots of playgrounds, I never saw these crazy excavators in the UK, the kids find them really frustrating as they require strength and coordination and are quite hard.  We are pretty much in the city centre here, in the background you can see Kempenfelt Bay, an inlet of Lake Simcoe on which Barrie sits.  Also some of you may notice that Jacob and Rose's new clothes arrived on Friday, just in time for our trip.

Sorry Gary, didn't mean to behead you

We went for a walk on part of the Trans-Canadian Trail where I saw Trilliums in the wild for the first time.  It was fabulously lush in the woods and we saw a garter snake and what looked like relatively fresh bear poo, Tom says this proves that 'bears don't' in the woods, they do it on trails but he is very rude.

Trillium is the provincial flower of Ontario

The highlight of our trip was a visit to the Simcoe County Museum.  We rode a penny farthing, saw lots of large, old vehicles and put the kids in a prison cell that formerly sat on a railway station for conveniently depositing felons while waiting to change trains.  They should consider one in Lancaster.

Don't they look good behind bars

While we were there we also accidentally gate crashed the opening of an exhibition about the War of 1812.  During some rather boring speeches Rose chose to sit next to a very nice lady in a pink dress and engage her in intense conversation about hair clips and sandals.  It turned out that she was the Mayor and later she jokingly (I think) invited Rose to cut the opening ribbon with her.

It was all filmed for local TV but I'm sad to say that my children were not deemed photogenic enough and we were not on the news broadcast.  Or perhaps our English accents reminded them that we didn't show up in time in 1812 and the Canadian peoples had to see off America without our help.  Oh well, Rose got to do some shmoozing, we all got in for free and there was cake, what more can you want from a trip to the museum.  Finally, here are the kids being 19th century Canadian soldiers.