Road Trip 2003 - Aug 13

Karen’s Apartment

Ottawa is a really cool city. I would love to live here - perhaps I’ll be able to do my last workterm here. Karen says that it is brutal in the winter though… but my last workterm is in the summer and I can verify that it is great in the summer. :)

However yesterday is where this story begins. In the heat. We checked out of the hotel around 11:00 EDT and brought our stuff to the car. Since we had paid to stay there all day, we left the car where it was - trapped behind other cars. At first we headed up Rue Ste. Catherine in an easterly direction from Rue Ste. Laurent. This was a seedier part of the street. Not overly so, but that was the general sense that I got. I’m not sure how many blocks we walked - a lot - then we headed down to Boul. Rene-Levesque. At this point it must be like 30º and the sweat is just a rolling. Fortunately I had the audacity to slather on the SPF 45, which like Chris mentioned, left me whiter than I was. So once we got back to roughly where the car was I got a bottle of water so that I wouldn’t pass out and we sat in the hotel lobby to cool off. After consulting a map we decided to head up Rue Ste. Catherine in the other direction. This proved to be much more “touristy” which was fine with us. In fact there was a Futureshop along there that I stopped into briefly. We walked all the way up to Rue Cresent. and then swung up to Sherbrooke. This was a pretty fancy street - the Ritz-Carleton was along there and we saw a couple of Porche parked on the street as well. We did stop at McGill which was along Sherbrooke as well. We actually went into their “computer science building” which is just two floors of the Engineering building which was undergoing renovations. But we poked around and left with the satisfaction that our choice of universities was a good one. :)

Getting out of the city once we got back to the car was another story altogether. In our infinite wisdom we decided to leave during rush hour. We followed the elusive route 720 west until it turned into the 20 west - slowly. Then we followed the signs for 20 West (Toronto) until we got to the turn off for route 40. We were now officially pointed towards Ottawa. We stopped to get some sandwiches made from the stuff in our cooler and we were back on our way. The drive to Ottawa was very nice. We left the highway at one point to take the “scenic” route along the Ottawa river. It was a nice drive and before we knew it we were in Ottawa. After checking to see if the aviation museum was open (it wasn’t), we passed over into Ottawa.

Driving around Ottawa was fun - and much less stressful than driving around Montreal. That may have been because I wasn’t driving around Ottawa myself, but in any case the city was awesome. At one point we managed to find ourselves in Hull… quite by accident but we got back and cruised the Rideau Canal for a bit. We were basically killing time before Karen was finished with Ultimate Frisbee because all of the attractions were pretty much closed at this point.

We did meet up with Karen and friends at a place called the Fox & Feather, up on the patio. We chatted and sociallized for a bit and then took off for Karen’s place. Geeking. Sleeping. And here I am… back at the computer. That is a rough break down of what we did yesterday, there were details that I might have missed but I’m sure you get the idea.

Cheers. cb -out