Imagine a Toronto suburb, now imagine the most boring Toronto suburb – that’s Mississauga. Commuter trains, highways, and unworkably wide streets thread across Mississauga to get residents to work in downtown Toronto. Mississauga isn’t a destination in itself, it’s a means to spend time in Toronto. For locals, the real Read more…
I had to cover the Panda Game in Ottawa as part of a class assignment. Apart from having attended a football game in Berlin between Bayern München and Hertha BSC at the Olympiastadion in Berlin out of curiosity five years prior, I had not been to a competitive sports game Read more…
There’s a hill to the north of Toronto, on that hill sits North America’s largest castle – Casa Loma. It was completed in 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, a Canadian industrialist. The castle is now a museum showing off its 98 rooms and long corridors. There’s also an escape room Read more…
The history of Chambly’s fort is as storied as the one at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. After all, they were part of the same defence system built by the French in the 17th century. A wooden fort was first built in 1665, the remnants of which can still be seen in the ground. Read more…
If John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Clint Eastwood could be neighbours this would be the place. This national park is so stunning I cried as I was driving through the twisting valley road. The pictures are real and being present in the dry gorges and between colorful sandy mounds was Read more…
A member of staff at the Boréalis museum told me that Trois-Rivières used to be the “paper capital of the world” with their world’s largest paper factory in the 1950s. The factory was razed about a decade ago to make way for new apartment buildings and only the water filtration Read more…
Founded in 1697 and completed in 1715, the Ursuline monastery in Trois-Rivières is one of the few French-built buildings to survive the fire of 1908. Although it is now a museum, it is still a working monastery. There are no young women becoming nuns so the 40 last nuns are Read more…
I’m stretching the Magog region to include Saint-Benoît-du-Lac where a Benedictine abbey lies. The monastery was founded in 1912 and the construction of the present stone structure began in 1939. The cheese factory was actually built a year before but didn’t serve its cheese to the public until 1943. The Read more…
Mostly known for its military history, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu is the site of the first French fort in Canada. First built in 1666, Fort Saint-Jean has been continuously occupied from 1748 to the present day, albeit changing hands several times. The second fort was built in 1748 and destroyed by the French Read more…
William Lyon Mackenzie King kept a daily diary totalling about 30,000 pages from 1893 to 1950, almost all of it is available online on the Library and Archives Canada digital library. He wrote much of his diary at Kingsmere near Gatineau, an estate that comprised of three parts. Kingswood was Read more…