Capital Punishment

After moving on from the seemed-like-an-eternity visit with the in-laws, we made our way to Ottawa – Canada’s capital.  Ottawa is the fourth largest city in the country (with just under a million residents) and is known for being a clean, quiet place, maybe even a little bit boring.  That said, it has the beautifully ornate federal parliament buildings, several decent museums and an impressive canal running through the middle of town (that turns into the world’s longest skating rink in the winter) so it’s a fun place to visit.  At least that’s the way we remember it, having lived there in a past life.

So when we rolled into town, we didn’t have to revisit many tourist attractions but there were lots of old friends to catch up with.  What we forgot was the fact that most (nearly all) of them are big boozers.  [Editor’s note: this is a fairly easy phenomenon to understand: most of our friends work (or worked) for the federal government so alcohol is a necessary daily consumable for coping purposes.]  Accordingly, in order to properly reacquaint ourselves without offending anyone, we were obliged to partake in numerous cocktail/beer/wine/hootch-filled evenings.  It wasn’t easy but we made it through.  And if we survive the rest of the Canadian portion of this trip (particularly Nova Scotia) our livers will be donated to science…

A special shout out goes to our friends, Bob and Judi Webb up in Chelsea, Quebec, who added live music to the entertainment value.  Bob, a longtime musician, has recently rekindled his love of bluegrass and has joined a new band, The Pie Plates.  Happily, Bob spent much of our two day visit practicing his dobro and banjo (the Bear’s favourite genre of music is bluegrass so she was enthralled) while Judi cooked and fed us more wine and cocktails…

To see a live backyard performance, check out https://youtu.be/D4miV97bo9c.

Thanks to all our friends in the National Capital Region for your extremely generous hospitality!   We’re now off across Quebec to detox…