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…
After writing about the best gelato in Vancouver and the best ice cream in Seattle, I just have to write about the best ice cream in Ottawa. Carp Custom Creamery offers classic American flavours like lemon blueberry, double vanilla coconut, and chocolate fudge with the consistency of good Italian gelato. Read more…
The Seattle Monorail is just under a mile long and probably one of the world’s shortest urban railway lines. It was built to shuttle passengers between downtown Seattle and the Space Needle, which was the site of the 1962 World’s Fair. The two trains, called the Red Train and the Read more…