Canada 2013: Ottawa

After we left Montreal on Thursday, we drove to the Ottawa area, where our dear friend Alison and her family live.

We met Alison during our first trip to Canada (2008) when we went to Toronto. At the time, I didn’t know her well at all and for some reason thought that she lived somewhere near Toronto, so I asked if she would be interested in getting together.

It was only later that I realized that the drive from Ottawa to Toronto is 4-5 hours IFtraffic doesn’t suck (it did) AND no children get car sick so the driver has to pull over to clean things up (they did, so she  did).

But, we all just clicked, adults and children alike. Little did we know that this would be the start of a beautiful friendship. Five vacations in the past six summers have involved this magical Canadian-American pairing. We’re already talking about next summer.

Alison lives in a village near Ottawa and the surrounding views are pastoral.

Since we had visited before, we didn’t feel a huge amount of pressure to go out and do things. Mostly, we were there to see our friends. So the weekend was relaxed and quite chill. We slept in, went for walks around the neighborhood, and ate a lot.

But we did get out.

There was the all-important beverage run.

On that same outing, we stocked up on Canadian chocolate and a metric crap-ton of cheese curds.

(More about Canadian foods in a future post.)

Later in the day, we attended a kids’ soccer game, but I’m not going to post photos since none of the players were my kids.

And after that, we all had dinner with another friend who lives nearby, but I’m not posting photos from that because I was so busy laughing and enjoying the great company that I totally forgot to take pictures.

The next day, we  walked to the village farmers’ market.

And we drove into Ottawa, where there was a street festival with buskers galore, so we got to see all sorts of fun entertainment.

We wandered around Ottawa a bit and enjoyed this beautiful city.

And overall, we had a fabulous weekend and were sad to load up the car on Sunday and head toward the border. Thank goodness for the wonders of email, Facebook, Skype, texting, phones, and Twitter to stay in touch with friends who live far away.

Our vacation is winding down — cue sad violin music — and we are en route to Virginia. One thing I do need to tell you about is all the gustatory delights we experienced while north of the border, which I’ll do in my next post.