Hamilton, Ontario with Kids and Teens: HMCS Haida and the Royal Botanical Gardens

travel dates: June 2024

I didn’t know anything about Hamilton, Ontario before we started planning our Canadian cities trip, but I started looking into it when I realized that Bronte Creek Provincial Park , our campground of choice for exploring Toronto, was actually closer to Hamilton than to Toronto itself. And it was a Canadian city, too! The third largest in Ontario, in fact. And there’s lots to do there! Spending some time in the Hamilton area also gave us a break from making the somewhat arduous trek into Toronto every day.

We had a very short drive from Niagara Falls and were able to get to the campground and set up pretty early in the day, leaving time for a trip to Hamilton to see HMCS Haida.

HMCS Haida is a WWII era destroyer that is now permanently docked in Hamilton, acting as a museum ship maintained by Parks Canada. You can tell because of the red chairs!

This was a fun, manageably sized ship to explore. They had great activities to keep kids engaged; we picked up an Xplorers book (the Parks Canada equivalent of Junior Rangers in the US) which was set up like a scavenger hunt that took you through the ship. It was a little outdated in places, and the staff seemed not to be very familiar with it, so keep that in mind (we’ve found that Xplorers is not nearly as popular nor as filled with ceremony as Junior Rangers, even though the books are always well-done). There’s also an activity where kids (or adults!) can hunt for a series of stuffed animals throughout the ship, and each one is accompanied by a story about a real life animal who lived on the ship at some point. It was pretty adorable.

The ship is kind of maze-like, with a lot of ladders to go up and down, which I find a bit unsettling. But I did great! And so did Abe, who also finds ladders unsettling and who also was a having a bit of a moment for part of our tour owing to waiting too long for a snack. Dave took him outside for a Clif Bar and he came back refreshed and ready to look for more stuffed animals.

August did great with the ladders, too! We’re all ready to be sailors now!

Oh! They also had a station set up outside to practice knot-tying, and Abe really enjoyed that (as did Dave):

At one point we spotted a couple of very active nests with baby barn swallows and the parents flying back and forth to feed them, and we spent a long time watching them, because birds are awesome. I don’t have a picture of them because we were keeping our distance so as not to bother them, but here’s a fake owl, which is also a bird:

There were a surprising number of sites in Hamilton that sounded really cool, and I hard time narrowing down what we would see, but I was really pleased we ended up here. Admission is only $4.50 CAD for adults, free for kids, and you get a lot of touring bang for buck for that.

After seeing HMCS Haida, we went to The Dirty South to eat. This was perhaps where we first started to learn that Ontario is a little fixated on the American South, both the music and the food. Interesting! Anyway, we enjoyed it, as genuine American southerners.

The next two days we did go to Toronto, which I’ll talk about in a separate post. But then the next day it was back west (well. Southwest), not to Hamilton proper, but to the Royal Botanical Garden, which has extensive property (Canada’s largest botanical garden!) that runs from Hamilton to nearby Burlington.

There are several different areas to explore here, and driving is required to get from one section to another in a lot of cases. The property is huge, and we knew there was no way we’d see everything, so we closed our eyes and pointed to a map. I’m kidding. I read up about the different areas online and we ended up going first to the Rock Garden and then to RBG Centre and the connected Hendrie Park.

The Rock Garden was definitely our favorite, and I gather that’s a pretty common sentiment. The was the first section to open, back in 1932, and it was redone in 2016. It’s an absolutely beautiful and delightful space created in an old quarry, and we all loved wandering around here. August declared the RBG his favorite botanical garden anywhere (high praise, as he’s a big garden fan), largely on the strength of the Rock Garden.

There are charming stone staircases all over the place:

Also there are interesting pine cones:

And adorable squirrel friends:

While we were there, there were these Olympic-themed topiaries all over the place as well (both at the Rock Garden and at other areas):

Next we drove over the RBG Centre, where there are some indoor exhibits and a tunnel connecting you to Hendrie Park, home of an enormous rose garden, that we caught at a pretty good time (in late June) to see lots of pretty blooms.

That’s a tea house back in there in the background, but it wasn’t open while we were there.

Ontario’s Pride decor is on point:

Next up: Toronto!