About Us

Welcome to our blog of our 2013 trip. We Have been camping since our honeymoon. Each summer we take a trip to a new part of our country. We try to stop at local fairs & festivals, take tours of manufacturing plants, do a little kayaking, and try to get an up close look at how people live! Join us! This Bog runs from our most recent post backwards. At the end of this year,I have left the past years blog. Double click on any picture to get a larger image. These are all low res versions. If you see one you really like, let me know and I'll send you a better image.

Liz & Bruce on the way to Minnesota, last year

Monday, July 12, 2010



On Monday the 4th of July we got to Peterborough. My prior knowledge of this area was stories and pictures my grandfather used to tell & show about his great fishing trips to Rice Lake, in the area. Peterborough is on the Trent Severin waterway, a series of canals that connects the St. Lawrence and the Georgian Bay through several lakes. The differing levels of these bodies of water is handled by a number of different devices. One unusual one is the Big Chute marine railway, a sling attached to a railcar,that moves your boat about 10 meters, completely out of the water.

The lock at Peterborough is called a Hydraulic Lift Lock. I’m not sure what I imagined it was. Liz was thinking a car lift in a service bay. Turned out she was right. It is two bathtubs 140’X33’.

When a boat enters one side, they flood the top side with an extra 12” of water, making it heavier, and sinking it, which raises the other side using hydraulic pistons. (Erin, I’ve got the technical brochure for you). Completed in 1904, in order to get goods into Canada, and furs and crops out, it still operates today for pleasure boats.

Can you imagine pulling your boat of What ever large value into a hundred year old tub held up by hundred year old components? Now look at the next picture closely... under the red sign, there are golfers way down on the ground below!

The thing I’ve always associated with Peterborough is canoes. Peterborough is the home of the canoe museum where we stopped on Tues. The canoe, in all of its many forms was Canada’s earliest transportation vehicle. There were hundreds of them. I was surprised there were so many different shapes and styles for different purposes among the earliest ones. The Bowman’s have a long history of canoeing as well. My grandfather courted my grandmother in a canoe, named “Cupid”. Liz and I went canoeing on our honeymoon in Algonquin, and we love our Kayaks today. The museum had a “courting canoe, which my grandfather should have had, with a phonograph in it

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Next…. On to Algonquin, Canada’s oldest Provincial Park.

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