Last of Ottawa and on the road to Barrie Ontario

Friday night the 20th we had an absolutely first-class Italian dinner at Mama Teresa Restaurante on Somerset Street in Ottawa. This was the kind of meal with many Italian servers hovering about you and the absolute perfection in serving and preparation for all of our different dishes. Here is the outside of the place as you walk up ...

Tyler and Dannielle left on Saturday and that is when we toured Parliament in the last blog. Saturday night we hit another pub-like place right next to the Lord Elgin Hotel called Browns Social House. Great selection of pub food, good service and music to please any generation.

Saturday night we had a bit of a thunderstorm but as the hotel is this massive granite mountain with foot thick walls we didn't think much of it.

Sunday morning our daughter was to fly out of Ottawa to Toronto and then on to Dallas. She got a call from the airline that the flight was cancelled and a later flight arranged. Not having looked at the news we took her over to the airport a bit after noon and wondered why the traffic delays going to the airport. Wow. 

This was the road to the airport. We soon realized that about ten hours earlier a massive windstorm had hit the area, killing nine and leaving a hundred thousand without power. The reason for Leigh's cancelled flight was obvious ... if it was on the ground when this hit, the planes wings were somewhere in the next province.

You can see that most of the metal light poles were just snapped off and the airport was running on emergency generators. Our daughter did get off late and then spent the night in Toronto without luggage, courtesy of Air Canada, but did get back to Dallas the next day ... luggage a week later.

After all that excitement, we headed over to Barrie ... about 300 miles of two lane, winding road. Then realized that I had left my camera in the Starbucks at the hotel ... rats! We called the Lord Elgin and they had retrieved the camera and would send it to our niece's house near Gravenhurst ... wonderful service!

The road trip from Ottawa to Barrie, while beautiful, was much longer and very tiring driving and almost eight hours later we arrive at our Airbnb in Barrie. We had intended to see if we could stop by our good friends in Bobcaygeon on the way but because of all the previous week's events we were just plain exhausted.