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Part of our heritage: Ottawa couple aims to road trip all 87 Heritage Minutes

CBC News
July 8, 2017

‘This is extra nerdy. This is very nerdy,’ says Minutes road tripper Jim Ellwood

There have been homages to the beloved Heritage Minutes since they first aired more than two decades ago: there are fan-made posters, lists ranking every single minute from best to worst, carefully crafted musical tributes, even PhDs penned about them.

But an Ottawa couple who are superfans of the 60-second vignettes are hoping to top all that — Rebecca Bartlett and Jim Ellwood are on a coast-to-coast quest to visit a location related to each of the 87 Heritage Minutes.

They started in Quebec City in March and have already whizzed through 32 stops; from birthplaces and tombstones to museums and statues.

The minute about inventor Guglielmo Marconi and the first transatlantic radio message took them to Signal Hill in St. John’s, where that message was received. For the Avro Arrow minute, the couple visited the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, where bits of the scrapped plane are stored.

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