Mark and Nicola: Day 35

Sleeping in this morning we rushed to catch the only open spots on an English speaking tour of the mint. We called at 9:40 before we’d gotten ready at the motel and the tour happened to start at 10:00. Needless to say, neither of us are wearing deodorant and I’m pretty sure we are wearing the same clothes from the day before. The mint was very cool but unfortunately photos were not allowed and there were RCMP around so I decided to obey the rules. I still managed to get a couple sneak pictures and we got a photo of Nicola and I holding a $350,000.00 bar of gold, which was quite heavy. The tour was great; it took around all of the machines and through the entire manufacturing process. The Winnipeg mint makes all of Canada’s circulated coins while the Ottawa mint makes collector coins. The plant can pump out over 15 million coins everyday. Only 40% of the capacity is used to make Canadian coins while the rest is to make coins for 60 other countries around the world. The Canadian Mint recently created the purest and largest gold coin in the world which will be on display in a week. Unfortunately we missed it because it would be cool to see a $1,000,000.00 coin made of 99.999% pure gold, the purest ever created. After the tour we took the Yellowhead highway, different from the highway we took heading east, which takes us to Saskatoon to camp for the night.