Day 48 - Prison – (Carrying Place ON, Ivy Lea, ON)

Today was an interesting one, physically for me. I had my “legs” for the first 30 miles, lost them for the next 30 miles, and seemed to find them again for the last 50 miles.

Along the way we did a lot if sightseeing. The first stop was at one of the few remaining, active Drive-In movie theaters in North America. Riding around the screen and through the field brought back fun memories of dusk-to-dawn horror-fests.

Our route started in Prince Edward County, basically a peninsula in Lake Ontario, and after a short ferry ride, along the shores of Lake Ontario to Kingston where we visited the “Canadian Prison Museum” housed in the warden’s former residence directly across from the maximum security prison at Kingston.

Not for the claustrophobic!!!

I got to try out some of the forms of punishment for unruly prisoners – an Isolation Coffin in which the prisoners were enclosed for up to 8 hours at a time to force them back to compliance, and a form of water boarding in which the prisoner was shackled in a form of stock and his head was enclosed in a barrel with an opening at the top. Above the barrel was a much larger barrel which fed a continuous stream of ice water into the smaller barrel containing the prisoner’s head. I guess this is where the term “cooling off period” came from.











After our prison tour, we did a tour of the Royal Military College. What the photos don’t show is a rather spectacular “endo” (or “arse over tea kettle” as my father would have said) that I did while riding through a field up to one of the tanks. The rather deep gopher hole which ate my front wheel was overgrown with grass so I didn’t see it. I think Kelly and Judy are still laughing at the sight of me being launched over my handle bars, fortunately onto soft ground. No harm, no foul as the saying goes, I am still laughing too!

Post "faceplant!"