Rained hard all night and although I like the sound of rain on a tin roof - it kept us awake most of the night.
Today we went to the Canadian Bush Pilots Museum. The museum is actually in a hangar that the Ontario government used for its planes - complete with a test engine facility.
This is an awesome museum - one of the best we have been to. There were two films - "Bush Angels" which is about the Beaver and you take a trip from the water into the bush and through the mountains - awesome!
This is the Beaver - Dan says one of the best planes ever built. I think they only built 1600 and 1200 are still flying today.
This plane has revolving floats for fighting forest fires. The Beaver was built by DeHavilland in 1948 and was the second Beaver ever built - and it is the oldest flying Beaver in the world.
Then the next film was 3D with glasses and it was called Wildfires, and it was about the fires near Pickle Lake in 2010 - the largest fire ever recorded in Ontario. It was very well done - you actually felt like you were there, flying with the pilots. And the effects were fabulous. Well done by the Ontario Government.
This depicts the equipment the fire fighters had to have.
This is a engine similar to ones Dan worked on in his airline days. It is a Pratt & Whitney 18 cylinder rotary gas engine.
This is the Canadair CL215 that was the first purpose built water bomber designed in 1966 and can carry 5,455 litres of water!
This is a revolving water carrier for the Canadair CL 215.
Above is a Grumman Tracker and as they were surplus units to the US navy they were converted to chemical fire bombers. This one is painted the colors of Conair in Abbotsford, BC.
This is a turbo prop engine, a small version of a jet engine. This would have been used in the DeHavilland DHC-2 MK111 Turbo Beaver. There was a limited edition of these planes due to cost.
The above is a display of a typical 1940's fire camp used for extinguishing forest fires on the ground.
There was an awesome display honouring Sault St. Marie's Dr. Roberta Bohner, Canada's first woman astronaut. Well done display.
It's still raining so we are not going to the Soo Locks, drat, but we have seen locks so I guess we will pass. There is an International Toll Bridge here between Sault St. Marie, Ontario and Sault St. Marie, Michigan - the sister cities. Back when Canada was not a country yet, circa 1700, this region was one and when the area was split into two countries they kept the original name. So there are locks on the US side as well, but they are commercial - the locks on the Canadian side are recreational.
Back to camp and we pass this statue - which reminded me of Dan and Robbie! Makes me laugh.
Still raining! Tomorrow we move on once again.
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