Mon June 20: Prescott to Crysler Park Marina ON

What a sweet, peaceful night it was.  Just a train far off in the distance... That's a melancholy, yet romantic noise, isn't it...?

Today's map - Prescott to Crysler Park Marina.

Ok - another new rule.  When the person driving from the upper helm calls the lower person on the intercom, they need to answer...  Rick almost had a heart attack that I had fallen overboard when I failed to respond and he couldn't see me.  We practice what to do when a person falls overboard, but we have never been able to come up with a foolproof system that indicates if that has occurred.  The engine makes enough noise to obscure a splash, and maybe a yell.  

The stupid chart on the right is under the impression that Canada has not yet been discovered and/or mapped.  Fortunately the chart on the left is up-to-date.

 

The first of the Big Boy Locks today - Seaway Iroquois.  We have never been in locks that were used for commercial traffic, and so nerves were running high.  

Rick gets his balls in order for the big lock!

 

We are FLYING down this river now.  As the channel narrows the water speeds up, and since there are no tides effecting it due to the locks, it's all running, FAST, down to the Atlantic Ocean.

 

The first of the beasts is in Canadian waters, and so VERY ORGANIZED (hint hint US system).  Rick had paid and reserved our slot online - pleasure craft have their own locking times as the big ships are built to just fit these locks and there can be as little as 1' clearance between them and the walls once inside.  They'd snap us like a twig.

We wait our turn at the Iroquois lock.  It turns out that when the river is high this lock has no drop.  So basically they waived us through. 

Exiting the lock you can see the damn off to the left - the lock

is on the right far in the distance.  These are BIG serious gates to let water out, or stop it.  The little ones on the Erie seem like toys by comparison.

These are, I am NOT making this up, the RCMP - the Royal Canadian Mounted Police!  Rick is so wound up about when we will be boarded, that I just wish it would happen already!  They will want to see that all our documentation etc is in order; and of course it is because, have you MET Rick?!

Once we arrived at the Crysler Park Marina and docked with a little help from a friendly neighbor boat owner (we needed the help as the wind had us sideways in the docking slot-good thing there wasn’t another boat nearby), we checked in at the office.  They gave us two free tickets to the Upper Canada Historic Village.  We had seen the village on the map but didn’t think we’d be interested in visiting as our distant memories of Colonial Williamsburg seemed to satisfy our interest in “reenactment history”.   But with free tickets and only a short bike ride, we decided to take a chance and go explore a bit of history from the area in the 1860’s.  

No one knows what to make of this hat (this is a “Brim” sunshade hat) - it literally stopped traffic in Clayton.  I got ‘hat’ calls!

The Upper Canada Village was a wonderful discovery and we are so glad we went.  The area started to be built up as an attraction in the 1950’s with historic buildings brought here from the surrounding area.  The St. Lawrence Seaway included the building of a number of damns for hydroelectric  power and the lakes created by the damns flooded many small towns.  So, in order to save some of the areas’ history, buildings were dismantled and brought here.  Over the years over 55 buildings have been moved here and the resulting village is an 1860’s historical gem.  But even better is that many of the buildings are actually used for the trade that they were originally intended to perform.   Thus, we stopped in at the flour mill and had a great lesson in how to mill flour.  They actually sell 5 lbs bags of the milled flour at the gift shop. 

The village has a school with a teacher, a shoemaker, a dressmaker, a tin smith, a sawmill, a bakery (they make 300 loaves every day and they sell out in about 30 minutes), churches, a print shop, a doctor’s house (the doctor actually made house calls and didn’t see patients in his house), an old time tavern and many other things.  Every building is staffed by people actually making things and they are all so friendly.   

They have their own ye olde printing press.

We got to milk a cow and there were a bunch of piglets running around. Rick had a Charlotte’s Web moment!

We really enjoyed it! As an added bonus, the area is significant for the battle of Crysler farm during the War of 1812.   Hooray-we bagged another battlefield/fort! 

We rode our bikes back to the marina and had a quiet evening.

The boat next door. I wonder if this is like ‘Netflix and Chill’.