… on the road again and tonight will be my last night in North America.
This morning was rather confused though. According to Casey’s temperature gauge its 14°C outside – yet again!
This gives the lie to this idea about severe winters out here in Freezing Cold Canada doesn’t it? it’s flaming mid-November – what is the weather like in France … "it’s just as " – ed.
Mind you it’s below freezing and its snowing in Labrador.
I have just seen now on the other carriageway of this highway – heading in the direction of Windsor a vehicle that I am absolutely convinced is one of the big Fiat 125s.
If it is, and I cant think what else it could be, it gives a lie to the old story about “Fix It Again, Tony”, doesn’t it?
And quite a bit later somewhere on the road to Niagara Falls I saw an XKE – an E-type Jaguar – heading towards me. This was one of the late-model hard-top coupé version, and when was the last time that I ever saw one of those?
It wasn’t a convertible, though. And when was the last time I saw one of those?
And it was round about this point that I remembered that I had forgotten to take a photograph of the Ambassador Motel where I’ve been staying just now. I’m not doing so well, am I?
My road took me towards Hamilton and the airport there. And, more precisely, the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum based at the airport.
The Museum tells us that its mission is “To acquire, document, preserve and maintain, a complete collection of aircraft that were flown by Canadians and the Canadian military services from the beginning of World War II to the present …”
Such as this Bristol-Fairchild Bolingbroke, which we Europeans know much better as a Bristol Blenheim.
This is a reconnaissance version, as you can tell by its elongated snout.
When I say that this is “a” Bristol-Fairchild Bolingbroke, I’m being somewhat economical with the truth. It is in fact “many” Bristol Bolingbrokes.
When they were taken out of service they were sold off for scrap and the shells were very popular with farmers as chicken coops and the like.
Even today, you can still find them on farms and in scrapyards, and a total of eight of these “wrecks” have gone into assembling this one.
No prizes for guessing what this one is.
It is of course a Supermarine Spitfire, and the cockpit and a few other bits and pieces tell you that it’s a late-model one too.
As I suspected, it is indeed a late-model – a Mark XVI from April 1945 but which never saw actual combat.
Another aeroplane in here that never saw combat – although it certainly was old enough to do so, is this one.
Again, no prizes for guessing what this aeroplane is. It’s a Douglas DC3 – the legendary Dakota.
It’s always been a civilian aircraft – not a converted C47 “Skytrain” like so many were. She first flew in 1939 and spent the war years flying for Eastern Airlines.
Now here’s an aeroplane that I’ve been looking forward to seeing.
It’s a Westland Lysander and you may be surprised to learn that I’ve never seen one of these “in the flesh” before.
Built for an Army Co-operation role, there was a mix-up over the specifications and it turned out to be totally unsuited to the task.
However, its slow speed (stalling at only 65 mph), very short take-off and landing requirement and rather spacious interior soon found the aeroplane ideally suited for another role.
These were the planes that, painted black, used to fly out in the dead of night to land in lonely fields deep in Occupied Europe.
There, they would put down Resistance leaders, bring in supplies and pick up evading or escaping airmen and the like
Here’s another fine example of military aviation – the very-much unsung B25 Mitchell Bomber.
Not very successful against front-line German fighter opposition, their deployment was much more common in the Pacific and Mitchells were the first Allied aeroplanes to drop bombs on mainland Japan.
This one didn’t though – it wasn’t built until 1945 and so missed the war. It was discovered on a airfield in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1975, patched up, and flew in to Hamilton under its own steam for a programme of restoration.
I reckoned that this was a Fairey Fleet Air-Arm machine but wasnt sure quite what it was. Subsequent enquiries revealed that it’s a Fairey Firefly.
These were carrier-based fighters (hence the fold-up wings) and were two-seaters. They carried a navigator because it’s much more difficult to concentrate on navigation over the sea – with no reference points or landmarks that a pilot might immediately recognise.
Although dating from 1943, this one is a “peacetime” 1951 model and comes from Australia.
Loads of other aeroplanes here, but there was only really one that I was interested in seeing of course.
The museum is the proud possessor of one of the very few remaining Avro Lancasters – and furthermore one of the only three that still flies.
My interest though was from another point of view entirely. I blagged my way in to see the assistant-director of the museum with the express purpose of talking to her about KB882.
Her response was frightening. “Ohhh – we could use it as spares for ours!”
That is what I call sinister and that will be an even worse fate than that which it is currently experiencing. I rather wish that I hadn’t said anything now.
Don’t forget – KB882 flew over Germany on wartime missions – it has far more history than the one here.
I’m coming round more and more to the conclusion that the only hope for the future for KB882 is that if I put my money where my mouth is and buy it myself.
I went off to seethe … "is this a typing error or a Freudian slip?" – ed … aeroplane and had a wander around inside it and a sit at the controls.
That has to be one of the highlights of the voyage.
It cheered me up a little – but only a little. I was definitely shocked to the core.
I actually felt quite sorry for the poor people who spent all of their air-time crouched over these guns.
It can’t have been very pleasant for anyone to have sat here behind your twin .303s watching someone with a couple of 0.5mm cannon and a barrage of 8x.303s coming swooping down towards you and knowing that you might as well just throw stones at them for all the good that your defensive armament will do.
but the position which no-one wanted to occupy – unless he was a complete psycopath – was the rear gunner.
Night-fighters did most of their stalking from the rear and it’s inevitable that the rear of the Lancaster is going to be the first aiming point of the night fighter.
I don’t care what anyone says, the Mark I eyeball was never as good as the Lichtenstein radar carried by the nightfighters and the first warning that the rear gunner received was a fusillade of cannon shells and machine-gun bullets.
The museum was in a hurry to close (have I been here THAT long?) but I had just enough time to stick my head inside the bomb bay.
Just imagine one of Barnes Wallis’ Bouncing Bombs or 10-tonne “Grand Slams” stuck up there!
But I had to go. So much more that I wanted to see too but here they were, throwing me out.
But what a place it is, though. A museum curator who “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing” – that’s a harrowing thought.
Makes me wonder what else have they cut up at that museum that they are keeping quiet about?
And now for my last night in North America, which I’m at Fort Erie.
Port Erie is just like Windsor – a Canadian city with a big American City just across the River Niagara there.
That’s Buffalo over there, and we’ve been there before – and it seems like 100 years ago now.
But here we have a railway museum, the start of the Welland Canal (that enables ships to by-pass the Niagara Falls) and a few other things too;
Like a big bridge – the Peace bridge of 1927 in fact.
Named to celebrate 100 years of peace between the USA and Canada, construction started in 1925 and was opened to the public on 1st June 1927.
At the time, it was the only bridge between Niagara Falls and Minnesota across the Canada-USA border that could take road-going vehicles.
As you admire the colour changes, let me tell you that the bridge is built of 9800 tons of steel – of which 9,000 tons is in the structure and 800 tons as reinforcement in the concrete.
Altogether, it’s 5800 feet long, which is about 1.1 miles in real money and it spans a river where the average current is about 10 mph.
That’s actually quite a speed for a river.
Some of the most spectacular Canadian customs facilites are here too. That building down there never dates from 1927 – I promise you that!
It incorporates the toll plaza apparently and dates from 2005. There are 14 lanes for cars and special facilities for lorries, of which over 4,000 pass through every day.
As a result, the facilities are often overwhelmed and there is talk of some kind of pre-clearance facility similar to the European TIR idea.
I found a motel at a reasonable price and I put a tin of beans in the slow cooker before I went on my ramble.
On the way back I went to look for some chips to have with them but would you believe … in the whole of this town near where I’m staying where there are three or four fast-food places, there’s not a six of chips in sight.
And so I sulked off for an early night.
I’m off to Toronto where my aeroplane will await me at 20:50. And I’m already depressed about leaving Canada. I shall be inconsolable by the time I get back to Europe.
… on Rosie the Crocodile – and just look at those big scary teeth!
While I was on my way up the coast I was overflown by a flight of four aeroplanes. Big four-engines French Army transport planes of some description – I’ve no idea at all what they might be.
At the end of the beach, away in the distance, they performed a U-turn and flew back off at a tangent somewhere inland. They were clearly up to something, that’s for sure.
While I had the camera out – do you see that lighthouse across there? That’s the lighthouse on the Pointe d’Agon where we were the other day. We’re actually at the mouth of the River Sienne (not the Seine) and the currents offshore are gradually shifting the mouth southwards by that huge sand bar over there. 
and which went down well with the crowd.
, and now he lives in Nova Scotia. And quite right too.
