Ottawa City, ON, Canada 2019 – NNs On the Wind

September 1, 2019November 7, 2019 Kathleen Ennen

AUG 31-SEP 1, 2019 – Ottawa City, CA

We drive across the bridge connecting the US and CA sides of Sault Ste Marie and enjoy great views of the lock system. There is a bit of a wait at the border crossing and the CA side seems quite a bit larger and more prosperous.

We are headed to Ottawa but stop half way at a simple but adequate campground near W Nipissing. We can see a small bay on the much larger Lake Nipissing. The Trans-Canada Highway is fast and boring. There aren’t too many large towns and the economy seems mostly rural/agricultural and the terrain a bit hilly at times.

We arrive in Ottawa on the 31^st and look forward to time in a city. It’s often hard to find RV sites in good proximity to a city. Turns out what appeared to be one of the closest required a bit of effort to get to “town.” We hailed an Uber to get us to the express bus about 20 minutes away. Then we rode the bus for another 20 minutes or so to get into downtown Ottawa.

We start our city trek near the Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill. They are large and grand! We find the walkway that goes behind the buildings and down to the river bike path. We walk around to the where the Rideau Canal joins with the Ottawa River. Here there are many pleasure boats transiting the 8 locks, one after the other. It’s great to look up from the bottom and enjoy another World Heritage Site.

We stop to watch the young lock keepers manually open and close the lock gates. There are vertical steel cables on the sides of the lock so it’s very easy to run a line through them to hold your position as you go up/down. Seems a better way than our canal trips in France in 2018 where you had to tie to a bollard on the top and then monitor the line as you floated up/down.

We walked up alongside the locks and went to the market area. The market is very crowded, colorful and somewhat expensive. We decided to find the local grocery store for our produce shopping. We stopped for a quick lunch and continued to the cathedral. On the way we spotted the US Embassy which seemed to be an architectural monster and out of place in this city.

We have traveled over the years and retired in 2017, when we started on a nine month long adventure departing in December 2017. In the past we’ve traveled to Sri Lanka, Africa (several times), Turkey, and made a number of trips to Europe, and St Lucia. Our 2015 trip to Turkey, took nearly 3 weeks to explore Istanbul, Cappadocia and the areas in proximity to Izmir.

This is a chronicle of our travels, past and present. We love to travel by trains, planes, ships, and cars – and love sailing whenever and wherever we can.

We retired from the US General Services Administration, the Federal Government’s landlord! Thom worked at planning and large scale program management of numerous projects and Kathleen, a registered professional civil engineer, was a project manager for many infrastructure and building renovation projects, including both design and construction aspects, in New England, Florida and the metro DC area. We lived in Washington DC for 12 years and upon retirement sold the house, putting a few things in a 5’x5’ storage unit and started traveling.

On return to the US in September 2018, after traveling to 21 countries, we bought a Class C RV – 2019 Thor Freedom Elite 24FE. We enjoyed our week long camping trip in New Zealand in a small converted van with few amenities, so this seemed liked a good way to tour the US. We hope to visit family along the way and as many US National Parks as possible.

UPDATE – the Covid pandemic made travel more difficult for us. We were abroad for several months when the pandemic started and returned to the US in July 2020. After several months in the RV to visit Utah and Albuquerque NM, we moved east, bought a house on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and sold the RV. For 2021 and 2022 we tended to our new house and cottage, gardens and various boats including a 18’ 1977 Marshall Sanderling catboat and a 25’ Steiger Craft Chesapeake fishing boat, and kayaks and a canoe. Hopefully travel will start again one day!!

May 2022