On the way back from Gananoque, we stopped in to Kingston to have a look at Fort Henry. The Fort was built in the 1830s to protect Kingston from attack by the Americans, and it’s a pretty impressive piece of work. We did a guided tour of the place, which was great as we had many of the special features of the fort pointed out to us. Features like the way the masonry work was placed at certain angles to enable troops to fire out of the fort but to make it hard for an enemy to fire in; like the fort’s position on the hill overlooking the St Lawrence to take advantage of the prevailing breezes which would blow the enemy boats towards them and into range of their canons; like the way the dryditch was built to stop the enemy from attacking and even if they did breech the perimeter of the dryditch there was a range of nasty surprises waiting for them like hidden canons and guns... Nasty stuff!

And speaking of nasty, we also got a quick glimpse of what life would have been like as a soldier in Her Majesty’s Navy back in the 1800s, and it was almost as awful! It may have been a good career choice if you looked good in red, but I don’t think there was a lot else going for it!

The modern Canadian Navy was also on hand to do a bit of shameless self-promotion and demonstrate some of their hardware and techniques for boarding enemy boats. We were treated to a short display of fighting techniques and excapes. Especially excapes. Lots and lots of excapes...

We finally hit the road for the drive back into Toronto, where the traffic was the usual Toronto rush hour traffic. Unfortunately there never seems to be any way to excape it.

That wrapped up the end of Part 1 of our summer break, and we sadly bid farewell to The Robs, who had to get up early the next morning to catch a flight to LA to surprise Giles, Em and Andrew with a visit to Disneyland. It was great to have them with us for the week!