Great Canadian Mint Tour

Although we spent the day driving from Winnipeg, MB to Thunder Bay, ON we still had time to stop over at the Winnipeg branch of the Royal Canadian Mint and take a little tour there. The first floor where you can mill about without paying for a tour was neat enough, there was a machine where you could print your own currency, a gold bullion bar and some interactive features.

While we were waiting for the tour we took a look around at some of the features. The first thing we saw was their set of 2010 Olympic metals they had on display. Close up like that you can almost feel like you won one! It was neat because they had patterns on the metal that linked up (If you somehow won multiple metals) into a larger pattern, sort of like a puzzle. Unfortunately the metals aren't pure bronze, silver and gold, they're just electroplated metals, which makes sense because I can't see the Canadian Government issuing $50,000 gold metals to every person who ranked first in every event.

I just saved myself hundreds of weeks of intensive athletic training

What I thought was really cool was the fact that they had a gold bullion brick. They just had it sitting out there in the open for anyone to lift up, and I have to say: That this was heavy. I mean, it was attached to the pedestal by a chain, and there was a security officer who's sole responsibility seemed to be ensuring that no one steals the gold, which is worth approximately $10 million dollars. The mint took is seriously enough that the security person had a gun, which she jokingly threatened to use if we tried to run off with it.

"What'd you get from the mint?" 'Oh, you know, just millions of dollars in gold bullion"

Of course, Geoff just had to try his hand at moving the gold bar, although it wasn't too hard to move it around, I think you'd have a hard time running off with it. Fortunately because I am blogging this post, we didn't get arrested for attempted capital theft so we're not currently rotting in jail.

Geoff wouldn't do very well in stripes and chains

Before we went upstairs, I took advantage of the coin making machine. Unlike the traditional ones that take a piece of bronze or copper and pressing it into some crazy shape, this one was more awesome. Although it cost $3, it used a machine that was actually used to print currency between the 1940's to the late 1960's. While they use more efficient machines now, the older ones are still quite useful for tourists. What I made was effectively a silver dollar, but I thought it was pretty neat.

Vacations: Exchanging money for sentimental memory since the 20th century

After that, we went upstairs to see the whole currency making process in action. Unfortunately they only made coins here, collector coins are made in Ottawa and they outsource the bill making process. However, did they ever make lots of coins! The tour guide said at full production, they make 20 million coins a day! While the Canadian economy has no need for that many new coins a day, the Mint actually uses it's excess capacity to make coins for other countries. At this point there are about fifty countries that outsource some or all of their coin currency production to Winnipeg. They claim that if you take 10 of any collection of international coins, at least four of them would be made at that location. Pretty neat huh?

While I wasn't allowed to take pictures of any of this process, I did have a good picture of the outside of the mint, which I guess will have to be good enough for everyone not actually on this roadtrip.

The Canadian government: Protecting it's secrets against tourists since 2001

Tomorrow we're going from Thunder Bay to Sault. St. Marie, with stops at the worlds largest Canada Goose (Statue) and a bona fide ghost town. Should be exciting!