Civic Holiday

Since today was a civic holiday and both of the archives were closed, I named today our tourist day.  Today we acted like tourists, not researchers.  

Our first stop was the Canadian War Museum.  It was really well done!  They had put a great deal of effort into the planning of the museum.  There was easy to simply follow along and not have to guess where to go next.  They did a decent job of telling a running narrative of the history of Canada through the wars she had fought in.  Additionally, there were frequent spots that were clearly geared for kids, replicas of weapon to touch, helmets and costumes to try on, full sized walkthroughs to explore and even a place where kids could do some of the physical training of a soldier.  Overall I think they struck a good balance between appealing to the adults who come here and keeping the kids entertained.  We both had a good time reading about the wars we studied in school from a different perspective.  Our favorite thing to read was about the American Revolution.  It was very different to hear the Americans called rebels, although it was true.  I also liked that they had an Enigma machine.  One of the books I am currently working through is about code breaking during World War 2 and seeing one of these machines that is so central to my book was really neat!

The little machine that caused so much trouble!

After that, we went back to the hotel and had lunch and a rest.  We found the tv channel here that play NCIS (my favorite show) regularly, so we watched an episode and half of that before heading off to our afternoon trip.  This time it was my pick, so we went to the national gallery of art.  Having been to the Smithsonian art galleries, the collection itself wasn't astounding, but it was good.  They had peice from most of the major names and had some artwork by less well-known artists that were beautiful.  I think one of my favorite things about the gallery was the building itself.  The designers worked very hard to create a good flow to guide you from room to room through different time and style periods.  They also made some beautiful courtrooms within the gallery that are very peaceful.  We mostly stayed to the impressionist period and earlier (my husband is definitely not a fan of anything more modern than that).  After an hour and half or so, we headed back to the hotel.

I went off to do my run once we got back so we could go to dinner afterwards.  I had a 45 minute easy run on the plan.  These easy runs are starting to get longer on me.  I covered 3.59 miles in those 45 minutes, so I was feeling pretty good about the run.  When I put my run in, I looked at my previous paces to see where this one stood. And I got an unexpected surprise.  It was slightly faster than my usual but that wasn't what surprised me.  I saw that my fastest pace so far was a recent interval run (no surprise) but the next fastest was a tie between my PR 5K in June and the 10K is just did!  That meant that I ran the same speed for both races!  Crazy!

After my run, we had planned on getting dinner from a food truck called Urban Cowboy, which claims to have "Texas street food".  We were kind of excited and hoped to get a taste of home in the far north, but my husband found out it was only open Tuesday through Saturday, boo!  We will just have to go another day.  We ate in the hotel and then planned out our strategy for the 3 days we have left.  They will be really busy but we are hoping to get through everything that comes in.