The Diefenbunker

Earlier this month, Husband and I took a mini-vacation to Ottawa to celebrate his birthday. We are both in Ottawa all the time for work and meetings, but we never get to really enjoy the city. Besides, there was something there (well, near there, in Carp, ON, the point kind of being to get out of Ottawa) that we'd both wanted to see for a very long time: The Diefenbunker.

To quote from its website, The Diefenbunker is "a four-story, 300 room, 100,000 square foot underground bunker, and was meant to house 535 Canadian government officials and military officers in the event of a nuclear war. Shrouded in mystery, the Diefenbunker, nicknamed after then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, was designed and built in secrecy during the crest of Cold War fear, between 1959 and 1961."

The Diefenbunker was fully operational until 1994, when it was decommissioned. In  1997, work began on turning the installation into a museum. What cold war buff could resist a glimpse into what a government - their government - living under nuclear lockdown would have looked like?

Because of the problems posting photos to blogger, I've uploaded some to Flickr, which I hope will make for a better experience for us both. You can see them here.

We also visited the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and Parliament Hill. I'll be posting some photos of those visits later. I also tweeted the trip with the hashtag #GeekiestVacayEver, because, well, wasn't it?

ronnie

Patio Day