One of the things I absolutely love about this country is it's commitment to education through the provision of free educational programmes and facilities. We have several of these facilities in our area. One of these is a visitor center at the lake that we visit often. This morning we drove clear past the playground that we usually go to and parked our car right in front of the visitor center. Rowan wanted to run to the playground but as soon as I told him that I wanted to show him the fish and turtles he happily entered the building with me.

I was amazed at just how much he enjoyed this center. He looked at just about everything they had on display and of course he loved the blue fish and the snapping turtles in the tanks. One of the installations was an interactive wood construction that illustrated how the locks on the river are filled and drained in order to allow barges safe passage on particularly steep parts of the river. Rowan played with this for probably about thirty minutes, loading and off-loading goods onto the little wooden barges, raising and lowering the water level inside the locks and moving the barges through them.

When we were done looking at everything inside the center we walked outside onto a huge wooden deck overlooking the lake. A small walk through the woods took us back to our car.

Rowan and I learned a lot this morning and left with more of an appreciation of our natural world and the way in which we humans interact with it.

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