Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings, on this beautiful Thanksgiving day!  In fact, for us Kingstonians, it's not just been a beautiful day but a beautiful weekend with temperatures reaching to the mid twenties!  After the few cold days we've had, this weather has been re-freshing (although it's really throwing off my wardrobe!).  Carl and I could not let a sunny weekend go by without catching some rays so we headed out on Saturday morning for some exploration!  We drove about 30 minutes out of town to a place called Jones Falls, the location of one of the lock systems along the Rideau Canal.  This location was built over 170 years ago and is home to what used to be North America's highest Dam (see picture on right).  Although we've been to several lock stations I never really knew what the lock system was for or how it worked so I found these fun facts interesting...

• The Rideau Canal is North America's oldest operating 19th-century canal. Most of the locks are still cranked open by old-fashioned muscle power.
• The original purpose of the Rideau Canal was to provide a safe supply route between Montreal and the Great Lakes in case of attack by the United States.
• The canal was one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century requiring the construction of 24 dams and 46 locks.
• The area was a wilderness when the Canal was built -- despite the northern climate, many of the workers died from malaria in the mosquito-infested swamps.
• At the Ottawa River end of the Canal, head engineer, Lieutenant Colonel John By, founded a community called Bytown. It later changed its name to Ottawa and became the Capital of Canada.
• In the winter, the Ottawa portion of the Canal is made into a gigantic skating rink, the longest in the world.

For more history on the locks, check out http://www.rideau-info.com/canal/history/hist-canal.html

 Originally I wanted to try and go away this weekend, to explore a new area and have a quite relaxing weekend hopefully staying in a B&B or hotel with TV!  We've been without TV for a year now and I must say I do actually kind of miss it.  Unfortunately, we couldn't find a place that was out of town and within our budget so we found a place in town that we could afford!  My friend Julie lives right across the street from us and was away this weekend so I proposed to Carl that we break in to her house, use the BBQ to cook up some steaks and watch a little TV!  He was all for it!  Breaking in wasn't to hard as Julie gave me a key and we got to spend our Saturday night with some TLC...And HGTV and the Discovery Channel... 

On Sunday we headed to Tweed after church to meet up with Great Great Aunt Joanie and Fred.  From there, just like last year we headed to Joanie's kid's cottages.  On our way there last year we had no idea where we were headed.  This year, from all of our explorations we could actually figure out where in Ontario we were!  We saw a lot of familiar faces from last year and a whole bunch of new faces!  There ended up being about 45 people over for dinner!  And just before the feast, we all gathered inside the little cottage to say grace, holding hands to pray, we encircled the entire cottage!  

And lastly, I will leave you with some colorful fall photos!

These are the trees right outside our window!

A view at Jones Falls

Leah and Carl

 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!