Ottawa Bound

 

On the 2nd of August we hopped in the car and headed east on the Trans Canada Highway or Highway 7 toward Ottawa the capitol of Canada. We went to meet old friends Sandy and Lawrence who had never been to Ottawa before.

 

We booked into the Lord Elgin Hotel below which is just a block or so from Parliament Hill.



Our friends came in to the airport that night and talked about this neat city a bit over cheese and crackers. The next morning we headed off hiking and paused for the changing of the guard in front of the old and regal looking Parliament building. The weather was very grey and threatening and so some of the pics remained pretty dark.

We then booked the thing below. This is the Lady Dive and is an amphibious bus or in their lingo an amphibus. It holds about 50 people and we started the tour right near our hotel. The city part of the tour was neat but it wasn't until we went across the river into Gatineau in Quebec that it got really fun.

We just roared into the Ottawa River as seen in one of their ad pictures.

The water part of the trip let us see the entirety of Parliament Hill from the back side, something we had never been able to do easily.

After that we visited the Notre Dame Cathedral and it was spectacular having just undergone a recent total renovation. The neo-Gothic interior was breathtaking and the hundreds of statues, stained glass, marble pillars, and awesome ceiling were a real treat.

Walking back to the hotel from the Cathedral this huge electro-mechanical spider named Mama was at the National Gallery.

But then the real thing visited us on our seventh story window and I got to see how the camera would focus. Fortunately she was outside. There was a small note typed by the window saying "please don't open the windows as the mosquitoes might come in the room" ... Hah, no bugs would get by this thing, eh.

And finally on the street this one caught our attention and of course we had to divert this way rather than that way!

And that was just the first day of showing our friends around this really neat city ... more later ...