Canada Day in Ottawa
The third installment of my East Coast trip.
Our stay in Cabano was mostly due to the fact I wanted to get to Ottawa for an interview with the HRI Internship folks, which I found out about on our first day out to Fredericton. Originally, we were going to stay two nights in Fundy and then head back through Ottawa, staying only a night.
Cabano is near the middle of the Petit Témis Inter-Provincial Linear Park, which is a well-known bike 130 km-long cycling and hiking trail. We arrived around 7:30 pm (after a long 6-hour drive from Fundy National Park) too pooped to go cycling on the trail.
After an uneventful day (I didn’t drop underwear, and I got to practice my French with the camp employees), we set out early the next morning. First stop: le fromagerie we saw a couple of clicks back before Camping Cabano.
The next couple of days became filled with food-centric fun, starting with our trip to the cheese factory. See, one thing I should do more often on a road trip is to stop when I see something that catches my eyes. Sometimes it’s for photos of landscapes or of interesting road signs or scenes. And sometimes it’s to find out how early the fromagerie opens: six heures au matin, to be precise.
Gleefully, around 8 am, we picked up a bunch of cheeses, some fruit wines (you can guess my choice: blueberry honey wine), took some pictures of Ruth in front of the sign, and went on our way to Ottawa.
In Ottawa, we got to meet some new friends. New foodie friends, to be exact. I met Toby Heaps and Jordan Gold at the HRI office, chatting with Andrea Chow, with whom all four of us we were staying. Toby and I started chatting about bikes, since we had already unpacked at Andrea’s and then cycled back into the office.
That evening, we drove out to O’Brien Beach on Meech Lake (yeah, the namesake of our constitutional accord) in Gatineau Park. We had a picnic BBQ on the beach after a swim out into the lake (my discomfort of swimming was not allayed by lack of goggles and it was further aggravated by some inner-thigh chafe). So I didn’t swim out – I stayed on the shore and started photographing the sunset. And it was beautiful. We had some really wicked food – Toby (who is the editor and publisher of Corporate Knights magazine, which I am a fan of, although I don’t get it in my Globe and Mail) dished out a round of Brie to everyone, cut up on slices of Macintosh apples.
Here I was, with a diverse group of people of amazing depth, experience, accomplishments, and whatnot just chilling in the setting sun, eating President’s Choice Swiss and Portabello burgers (yum!), and getting totally eaten alive by mosquitoes. I heard snatches of conversation between Toby and a former HRI intern Scott war-zone hotspots (Latin American, Bosnia, etc. which Tobey covered as a journalist), as the rest of us shivered, finished the food and Hungarian wine, and otherwise socialized.
After the swim, we stopped by the “the dep” (short for dépanneur – the ubiquitous corner-store and alcohol vendor in Québec) in Hull . The lineup of characters trying to buy their alcohol before the 11pm cut-off was interesting indeed, but nowhere close to the odd-looking family on whose curbside we parked. We had to try our best not to look at this family because they looked so forlorn, lumpy, and would have triggered us into fits of hysterical laughter. We all admitted it was mean, but we weren’t trying to be mean! It must have been how the dim street lamps cast light on them.
In the end, Toby and Jordan picked up some really nasty swill, which ended up going down the drain. Everyone was too tired to even have a couple of drinks – we just crashed on the living room carpet.
Canada Day was just great. A sea of people extended before me as we got off the 14 bus. We checked out Confederation Park, took part of a djembe drumming workshop, met up with friends, quenched Toby’s beer thirst (“Do you know if they have beer tents here?” “Uh, Toby, that’s the third time you’ve asked.”) – and ours – at a bar, satiated my gelato craving at Pure Gelato, ate quality vegetarian food at The Table Restaurant, jammed to folk music at Scott and Aviva’s, listened to the sweet haunting music of Daniel Lanois on the main stage at Major Hill’s Park, and watched the fireworks… from behind a tree. I think I want to be back next year (except I don’t want to be watching the fireworks from behind a tree – the fireworks made Andrea go crazy and start running towards it, an entirely forgiveable fault).
The drive back home was not great. We took the red-eye option, arriving home at 5 am.