Yesterday the family packed up for a good old fashioned road trip through the farmlands of Southern Ontario to visit a site I’d heard about for years but have never seen: the Base Borden Military Museum. This is a museum located inside one of Canada’s largest military bases.
http://www.cg.cfpsa.ca/cg-pc/borden/EN/facilities/pages/bordenmilitarymuseum.aspx
Since there are lots of folks here who are interested in military matters, I thought I’d give a little account.
First, getting there was not all that easy - it’s actually located on the base, not as I had thought just outside it. We approached the base from the south; we had to go through a military checkpoint to get in, with all sorts of signs promising violent anal probing etc. at the whim of the guards. As it was, they just waved us in without any probing. So far, so good.
After driving around the base a bit, we passed a canteen, a military barber shop, and a military bowling alley - my son Carl was asking where they kept the modern Tanks and Guns for the troops (I had to admit that I had no idea - but I pointed out that we now knew where they went for a haircut and for bowling. Carl’s notions of the military life - shattered forever 
) - finally we found the museum. You could tell you were getting close, because outside the museum were a lot of old military vehicles placed hither and yon - right outside the entrance was a Sherman tank.
The museum was a large building with two giant rooms, and a bored guard sitting behind a desk in the middle. There was no admission charge, but you had to sign in - I noted that exactly eight people had visited that day, so they aren’t exactly attracting huge crowds.
The exhibits were divided into two halves - roughly, one giant room had small stuff, and the other had vehicles and guns. The good part was that there was enough stuff there to keep a military buff happy for hours, if not days. The bad part was that there was very little description or order to the exhibits - just cabinets of ecclecticly organized stuff, some with labels, some without. A looted bronze bust of Hitler shared a cabinet with someone’s model of a tank and someone elses’ manual of the Queen’s Regulations, that sort of thing. In a way that was almost better - it was like a treasure hunt, you never knew what you could find.
There were many, many interesting things in the mix, as you looked through them: the stuff ranged from the War of 1812, through WW1 and 2 (a lot of WW2 stuff, probably the majority), through to the modern day. Lots of it was fairly mundane (metals for 10 years of KP from the early 1900s that sort of thing), but there were lots of oddities. Some of our favorites:
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A camouflage Tim Hortons hat, used by staff at a Tim Hortons opened for Canadian troops in Afghanistan (is there anything more Canadian than a weaponized Tim Hortons?
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Giant wooden spoons presented to logistics officers for meritorious service. Apparently this was a “thing”. Examples range over a 100 year span.
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A banged-up Italian WW2 tank with lots of rivets (many missing). You could see that this vehicle had a rough time.
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An artillery piece with a “casket holder” on top of it, presumably for military funerals. Grim.
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A truck that contained a mobile dentist’s office. Also grim. Though as my wife remarked, as painful as that office looked, it was better to have it available than not!
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Someone had chipped out a piece of wall from Cyprus containing Communist propaganda slogans in Greek.
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A WW2-era propaganda poster warning people not to talk about military secrets, saying “the walls have ears”. Pic was a cartoon of gossiping people having tea, with the wallpaper a design of Hitler faces.
Overall, it was worth the drive - particularly as the farmland we drove through to get there was very scenic. Lots to see, and you won’t be overwhelmed by the crowds while seeing it. Apparently there is also an aircraft hanger at the other end of the base containing all sorts of aircraft, but we were out of time - weekend hours are very short (I think it was 1-4 and that was it).