We woke up early, fell back asleep and then Dick came in and woke up Patti saying, "We have to leave now." It turns out that the time was 9:09 and we were expected for a tour at 9:30. We both threw clothes on and headed out the door as quickly as we could. We rushed across town, missed our 9:30 tour, but were able to be booked for one at 10 o’clock.
The tour was of the Royals Canadian Mint. Neither of us have ever been on a tour of a mint before, and found it fascinating. Canada has two mints, one in Ottawa, the national capital, which makes specialized coins and currency. The second one, actually, the workhorse, is located in Winnipeg. They have the capacity to produce 15 million coins in a day but rarely approach this. This mints makes all of the coins that are in circulation in Canada. Actually, it turns out not only coins for Canada, but they have contracts for 80 other countries around the world for making their coins. One of the biggest is the Philippines. They actually had a small contract with the United States one time where they provided “blanks “of coins for the US.
We went on a small tour lead by a very enthusiastic young tour guide, Cade. He talked us from start to finish on what it takes to securely make, and deliver coins out into the world. Because it was a weekend, the actual machines we saw were not working, but we still got a very good view on the process of coins being made. One of the things that was most interesting is the big coils of metal that get loaded and then stamped out with the blanks of coins. We also heard about the process of dyes being cut to make the engraving in the coins. It’s a very precise and interesting process as it happens.
One of the really interesting things was how, for Canadian coins, they have on the backside always the queen or king of the British empire. Because Queen Elizabeth had recently passed, and King Charles is now on the throne, there’s quite a process going on with a contest for what portrait of the new king will be on coins. We will now follow that even more closely having seen where the coins are made.
So we came back to our Airbnb condo and had a very nice brunch because we had missed breakfast before our tour. Then we loaded up and headed off for the next part of our day.
We went and visited the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. This was actually quite a well done smaller-sized zoo. We were delighted early on in our visit to spend some time with one of the tram drivers who is able to give us some advice on how to best visit this zoo. this is a role that Dick so enjoys doing as a volunteer at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. It was fun exchanging information with this tram driver and also with a volunteer who works at the zoo here in Winnipeg.
The highlight of the zoo was a very large premier enclosure for polar bears. This was modeled after the town of Churchill where so many polar bears gather every year. They have nine polar bears here, and a very large and well constructed environment for the bears.
In addition to polar bears, there were a lot of various kinds of seals, and caribou, and a lot of other animals from northern parts of the world. Many of the animals here were rescued from the wild. We enjoyed seeing the animals and were reminded, at various times, about how confusing navigating a Zoo can be when you’re not familiar with it. We had to retrace our steps a couple of times and we’re pretty tired by the time we had finished our three hours at the zoo.
We found our way back across Winnipeg to our little home. We took some downtime, and then Dick cooked a nice dinner with pasta and makings that we had brought along on our trip. One of the real advantages of staying in apartment rather than a hotel room is having it well set up for cooking, and this one really was. We had a great meal, and felt like just a little extra rest for the evening, rather than rushing out to try to find another activity. Winnipeg was beautiful, but the traffic was really intense and a challenge at times.
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