The Royal Canadian Mint was host to our visiting today. Unfortunately, the mint is closed for summer maintenance / vacation, but they are still doing tours. You get to see all the areas where the coins are minted, but you have to rely on video terminals to see how it all works. The Ottawa facility now only focuses on collector and investor coins, whereas, the mint in Winnipeg mints all the coins used in general circulation for Canada. Our mint also makes coins for many different countries around the world. Of course, we bought another couple silver coins to add to our collection. The Canadian art work on coins is absolutely beautiful. We bought another in the tall ship series that has a hollogram storm in the sky - quite cool. We walked around the Parliament area and found there was a peaceful protest going on with music, etc. It was pretty loud, so we headed away and onto Sparks St. to find some ice cream and cold drinks.

We took transit to get there, so we had quite a bit of walking today. It was much easier to take the train and bus than it is to try and find parking for a 1-ton truck in dowtown Ottawa. The people here are very helpful, so we got good advice every where we went as to the best ways to get where we were going.