July 29 – Ottawa

After seeing that last minute flights to the US would be cost-prohibitive, we've decided to salvage this holiday by doing a driving tour of central Canada: Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. It's perhaps for the best, since given our taste for long-distance, exotic holidays it's unlikely that we would ever actually book a vacation to somewhere so close-to-home and thus we would never see them.

When we discussed seeing Ottawa with people on the boat (who were mostly from Ontario) they insisted you needed at least three or four days to see it properly, since the museums alone would take a couple days. We nodded sagely and scratched our chins thoughtfully as we discussed the appropriate order to visit the museums, when in reality we had no intention of visiting any of them. With the possible exception of science museums, we find museums to be a bore and don't generally bother with them. They feel too much like learning, and we don't go on vacation to learn anything. However, we both did laugh at this sign:

We picture a stern father telling his kids "We're going to a museum today no matter what. If you're good we're going to the one on the bottom sign; if you're bad we're going to the one on the top sign."

In the end it took us a short afternoon to see what we wanted to see here, and most of that was taken up with a tour of the parliament building.

The real highlight of Ottawa is how fantastically efficient their public transit bus service is. I work with a few people from Ottawa and I think they've mentioned this in the past, but I really had to see it to fully understand how good public transit can be if a city actually wants it to be. I now understand that Calgary has terrible bus service because there is no political will to fix it.

Anyway... the blog has taken a bit more of mundane turn but our holiday has drastically changed direction.