Off to our Civic long weekend trip to Cobourg and Kingston. This will be day 1 of 3. My plan is to visit Cobourg for their annual sandcastle festival, Kingston for their museums, and Gananoque for their tower.
Our first stop is the Oshawa Botanical Valley Gardens. It is open to the public with no admissions and worth a stop if you are in the area. I wouldn't go out of my way to visit, but it is a nice park and I can definitely see picture potentials. We walked the entire park (at least to my knowledge) and it took us about 20 minutes.
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| Oshawa Botanical Valley Gardens. |
Next stop, Tyrone Mill, a suggested stop for donuts and butters tarts according to tripadvisor. I would suggest the ice cream and butter tarts, the donuts (they only have one kind) reminds me of Tiny Toms, but in donut form. Not that there's anything wrong with them, I just wouldn't make my way out to eat them. Everything is very reasonably priced here, $2 for a kiddie scoop ice cream (it is one scoop, more than enough for an adult), $1.50 per tart, and $0.75 for the donut. Allison really enjoyed the raspberry delight tart that they had which was a butter tart with raspberry and coconut in it. I got the lemon tart which tasted like lemon meringue and thought it was okay. The ice cream that they had was really good as well especially for the price. Also as a bonus, everything included tax. Make sure to go upstairs to visit the mill which still exists today to see what they make and if you can step out into the back, there is a very nice pond area with chairs that you can sit on and enjoy the view.
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| Pond behind Tyrone Mills |
Olympus Burger is where we went to for lunch and I would recommend a stop if you are in the area. I ordered the Ares and Allison got the Hermes and I would say Ares is the winner even though it had a bit too much peppercorns. The drinks here are bottomless which is a nice touch.
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| Hermes Burger from Olympus Burger |
A short drive away is Primitive Designs, a local shop that specializes in woodwork and metalwork that looks to be mostly imported from Asian countries. Worth a stop if you haven't seen any of these things before, but even though we both have, it was still pretty cool to see what they had. No cost to visit, all they ask if a donation if you take pictures of their large metalwork sculptures.
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| Megaton! |
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| Optimus Prime! |
We ended up going to Cobourg and seeing the sidewalk sale. I don't think this was worth visiting, but since we happened to be there, it was okay. They close off Hwy 2 (King St E) for a section and it is only accessible by foot. Located at the Cobourg beach is the sandcastle festival. I thought it was interesting to see, there are different classes in the competition, you can enter as an individual/team, business and master sculpture and there are awards for each type. It was cool to see the different types of sandcastles that were created.
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| Dragon! |
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| Inside Out! |
Checked into our stay in Cobourg at By The Pond B & B. We were greeted by an elderly couple who told us about their life experiences and B & B experiences and it was a neat learning experience. They asked about our breakfast preference, whether we wanted eggs and bacon in the morning or not and we said yes (who says no to bacon and eggs?!?).
Dinner was at Captain George's and we thought the fish and chips here were pretty good. Food was very quick, fish was golden yellow, not brown, so it was cooked just right for us and the fries were good to. It is a chain with a lot of locations in the area.
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| 1 piece dinner at Captain George's |
We were going to try to see the fireworks but ended up calling in early and missed out.
Tomorrow, we head to Kingston!
