Happy anniversary honey! Oh look a Beaver!

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail and Doug Pagnutti spent their wedding anniversary at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre yesterday.

They spent most of their time in the lobby there, with Doug passing books to Danielle to autograph.

The couple stopped here in the Sault while touring across Canada to promote Metcalfe-Chenail's book, For the love of Flying: The story of Laurentian Air Services.

"We did manage to arrive a bit earlier and run through and look at the planes," Metcalfe-Chenail said. "Actually Laurentian Air Services used to fly Beech 18s like the one outside - and DHC-2 Beavers like this."

Metcalfe-Chenail and Pagnutti are seen under the wing of the blushplane museum's Beaver.

"It was great to actually see some of the planes I heard so many stories about," she said.

For the Love of Flying began as a story about her family history but soon grew into so much more, said Metcalfe-Chenail.

"I'm a bit of a history nut and it's great to come across something like this," she said.

Metcalfe-Chenail comes from a family of flight enthusiasts and was thrilled to find that the story of an important chapter in Canadian aviation history had not been told yet.

As a researcher and writer freshly graduated from the University of British Columbia, she was eager to put her newly acquired skills to use.

So she started accumulating information about Laurentian Air Services from people who had been a part of it.

Metcalfe-Chenail used creative writing techniques to tell the story and illustrated it with photos found, borrowed and scanned with permission.

Many photos were never published before.

The result is the story of one of Canada's most innovative aviation companies, Laurentian Air Services, as it grew and flew over much of Ontario and Quebec over the course of 60 years.

"During those years, Laurentian was at the forefront of air tourism in the Ottawa region and the Laurentians of Quebec as well as fly-in hunting and fishing in Canada's north," says the back cover of the book. "It also pioneered the use of the Grumman Goose and de Havilland Beaver commercially and provided vital air support to survey and development work for such massive undertakings as the Churchill Falls and James Bay hydroelectric projects."

After signing books at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre, the couple drove up to Wawa to do the same.

Metcalfe-Chenail said she's already thinking about the next book and is considering the story of how aviation has impacted the spread of religion in the north.

Like the story of Laurentian Air Services, she believes it's a little-known but very interesting story.

To learn more about Metcalfe-Chenail and her new book, please click here.