Dragonfly Boating: Back to Kingston, ON

We enjoyed our three nights in the Thousand Islands—the natural beauty and outstanding Parks Canada facilities made it a side trip to remember. Yesterday we headed west again, into a building headwind and moderate chop at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence and on Lake Ontario. After 19 miles, we approached our destination of Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, and were met by dozens of small sailboats outside of the harbour entrance and a steady stream sailing out of the narrow entrance. The marina was built for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, remains a major Canadian sailing center and we had unknowingly booked our stay here during a large, multi-day youth sailing regatta. I overheard some seasonal slip holders grumbling about the commotion and inconvenience of hundreds of extra people at the marina, but we enjoyed the activity and energy of the kids and their families. In the slip adjacent to us is another MacGregor 26X with a family from Quebec aboard—their two teens are competing in the regatta and the family is staying on the boat. Map Link: Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, Kingston, ON

About 2:00 PM, a thunderstorm popped up out of nowhere and the races were quickly postponed, with boats scurrying for the safety of the harbor before the skies opened up. After the rain, we hit a couple of the tourist sites on the west side of Kingston that we missed last week. Next to the marina is the enormous Kingston Penitentiary, a former maximum-security prison, and our first stop was Canada’s Penitentiary Museum, located across the street in the former warden’s residence. Opened in 1835, the prison was one of the oldest in continuous use when it closed in 2013, and is now open to the public and a popular tourist attraction.

Water torture device from Kingston Penitentiary

Our next stop was Bellevue House National Historic Site, the former home of Sir John Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister. The house is a beautiful Italianate villa, where Macdonald lived with his family when he was a successful attorney and budding politician. They moved out shortly after their only child died unexpectedly. We really like the way many of Canada’s museums tell the stories of more than just European settlers. While Macdonald’s achievements are significant to Canadian history and helped make it the country it is today, he has come under increasing scrutiny for his treatment of Chinese immigrants and indigenous people. Thousands of Chinese came to Canada in the 19th century to work on the railroads, and hundreds perished on the job. When the work was completed, Macdonald signed the Chinese Immigration Act, which imposed a head tax to discourage more poor Chinese from entering the country. He also initiated the Canadian Indian residential school system, where native children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools to assimilate them into white, Christian, Canadian culture. For more than a hundred years, indigenous children were isolated from their families, forbidden to speak their native languages or practice ancestral customs, and were subjected to malnutrition, physical and sexual abuse by the government and religious authorities who ran the schools. Only in recent years has the magnitude of the horrors these children endured and the lasting trauma inflicted by this system come to light. Both the Canadian Government and the Catholic Church have made public apologies for their roles in this awful chapter of North American colonial history. Not-so-fun fact: Residential schools in the United States were just as bad and existed from the mid-17th until the early 20th century.

19th century beard trimmer

The weather was warm, with temperatures in the mid-80s and a gusty southwest wind, and we walked the two miles into Kingston’s city center, passing through the campus of Queen’s University on the way. We had dinner at Guac Mexi Grill, a Chipotle clone, then walked back to the marina. After three days staying on islands, it felt great to give our legs a good workout again. As soon as it was dark outside, we were sleepy and turned in.

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