An End of Summer Field Trip

Much of my summer has been spent in the company of my grandson. We celebrated the end of summer with a field trip.  At his request, we went to see different Rideau Canal locks than the ones we visited last year.

This is Hogs Back. From here to the Ottawa River, the Rideau River is separate from the Rideau Canal, with the canal moving calmly toward Downtown Ottawa, and the Rideau River rushing over rocks and rapids to meet the Ottawa River at the Rideau Falls. You can read more about it here.

https://www.rideau-info.com/canal/history/rideau-route/hogsback.html

Here we can see wild rushing rapids, as they pass over rocks that were compared to giant hogs in the river. The rapids have been transformed, by a dam, into beautiful waterfalls.

In the midst of this, we saw ducks sunning themselves on the rocks.

Find the ducks!

After climbing to the top of the dam, and walking across, we climbed down to the river and calmer water. It was a gorgeous day. 

We did watch the boats lock through, in the channel to the west of the dam, but that wasn't as exciting as the rocks and the falls.

Some knitting was done. My August socks have been finished.

Because this is Canada, and we know that summer will soon give way to cooler days, I started knitting mittens.

I was gifted this gorgeous yarn and a bunch more like it, so I expect I can make a lot of mittens.

A Trip West

 As I told you last time, we headed west for a gathering of the clan. Lots of pictures were taken and I will share a few.

In Victoria, we stayed in a condo apartment complex. The gardening around the building was wonderful.

The tree on the left is a Dogwood, floral emblem of British Columbia. The one on the right is a California Lilac, a popular hedging plant in Victoria.

I also discovered that Dogwoods come in pink, too.

The condo had a lily pond and it was just getting ready to bloom.

Oddly, although there were lots of benches through the apartment gardens, we never saw anyone sitting on the benches (except us).

It seemed that nearly everywhere we went in the city, we had to go around Mt. Douglas.

I liked the sun shining on it at sunset.

While in Victoria, we did some geocaching. I think we found a total of 10 caches. Our biggest achievement was to climb to the top of  Observatory Hill to find caches.

This is the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. It was opened in 1918. You can read more about it here.

The walk to the top and back was about 4.5 km and the rise in elevation was 167 m. We were fooled by the cache posting that said the cache could be done in about 30 minutes. If you drive to the parking lot inside the fence, that is possible, but we were there on a Sunday when the road is closed to cars. I'm pretty sure I got my steps in that day. We didn't see very many people (mostly nobody) but we did see a couple of bunnies and this lovely.

We saw a second one on the way back down the hill. We were surprised that it looks like the deer we see here except eastern deer have white tails and western deer have black tails.

This was the view from the top, looking down.

We also spent time in Parksville, which is the home of Rathtrevor Beach.

At low tide, the tide goes out a very long way.

You can observe little sea creatures in the tide pools.

You can build sandcastles.

Or, you can enjoy the wonderful views. 

The purpose of the trip, and the gathering of 4 generations was to celebrate a very special event.

It was the 90th birthday of a mother, grandmother and great grandmother. We decided to do it up in style.

On the way home, I was reminded of how vast my country is. While flying east, overnight, I awoke at about 2AM (maybe it was 3) local time, somewhere over the middle part of Canada, to see the sun rising in the north.

How cool is that?

Travel Adventures

 

I have been traveling. The last time I travelled anywhere was in October, 2019. Needless to say, this trip was very exciting.

I haven't travelled a whole lot, but having a bi-coastal family means that I've made a fair number of trips within Canada. One thing I know for sure is that one should never expect air travel to go smoothly.

My flying experiences started when I was in university. I was a co-op student and standby plane tickets in those days were about $25. So I used this when flying between my parents home and my co-op placement in Ottawa. On one trip, the plane landed at Peterborough and couldn't take off again. The airline offered a bus for the rest of the trip. (a 20 minute plane ride, 3 hours by bus). Most of the passengers made other arrangements, but the two starving students on the plane were going to be travelling by bus. Fortunately, a couple of businessmen with a private plane offered us a ride. So, I took a 4 seater to Ottawa, arriving about 2 hours after I was suppose to, but on time for work the next day.

A couple of years later, I took a trip to Vancouver to visit a friend who had moved there. The airline decided to go on strike while I was there. I ended up buying a standby ticket back to Toronto via Seattle, Chicago, and Detroit. Again, I arrived in time for work the next day. I now always fly with my passport.

I have had other adventures where getting home has gone less then smoothly. This time, our flight from Victoria to Calgary was going to arrive in Calgary about 2 hours after our flight from Calgary to Ottawa was going to leave. So we took another route home that saw us drinking coffee in Vancouver for a considerable length of time. At least we found reasonable good coffee.

So, what have I learned? Besides the passport, first off, be polite. The passenger agents are likely just as frustrated as you are. Start by asking for help. In this case, I asked if they could get me home. They checked and found that even if they sent us on to Calgary there were no seats to Ottawa on a later flight, or the next day even. So they sent us to Vancouver, where there were seats on the overnight flight to Ottawa. 

Secondly, be flexible in your plans. We have been upgraded by a passenger agent, and I think it was because we were not asking for anything but a flight home.

Finally, Canadian airports are a mess right now. The security people are unhappy and are taking it out on the passengers. If you don't need to fly, stay home. If you do need to fly, try to avoid major centres like Toronto or Montreal. 

I will be hiding in my house for the next while. However, it was worth the aggravation and delays for this:

 

Two of my favourite men, planning their activities for the morning! More BC pictures, soon.

Kate

A Trip West

We headed all the way west, to visit family, last week. So let me bore you with some holiday snaps.

Before we left, I was looking for something and found a UFO that needed very little work to finish, so I finished it up.

It is a scarf, in pompom yarn and given that it is 29C today, I guess it is going into the Christmas box. I wonder who will want a lovely soft scarf.

I also made 6 lip balm holders to take along as hostess gifts.

I managed to get a picture of 4, two had already been claimed.

The weather in Victoria was lovely, so we spent as much time as we could outdoors.

I tend to take pictures of things I don't see here. Ocean, mountains, lighthouse.

The highest point of Fort Rodd Hill. The fort was in use from the 1800's until the end of WWII. This is the Belmont Battery.

We went geocaching at Esquimalt Lagoon, but didn't find anything. I think our middle Canada mindset kept saying that no one would put a cache there because it would be destroyed in the spring floods. Of course, it is the ocean, so no spring floods, just tide.

I was invited to visit a private bonsai garden. This is a bonsai dogwood tree.

An azalea with flowers much bigger than we see them here. This one blooms in two colours, and it isn't grafted.

This azalea was tiered like a wedding cake, and also two coloured.

I was sworn to secrecy on the location of the garden, but it isn't really a problem because someone else drove, and I have no idea where I was.

This was the concierge at our hotel, an amiable fellow, named John. Not good on advice on where to eat, though.

This is the dock at Butcharts Gardens. I brought back lots of pictures of ocean and mountains.

This pretty much encapsulates Butcharts Gardens. From the bottom up, you can see the Italian Gardens, The Rose Gardens, and the tops of the trees in the Sunken gardens, with a view of the trees going up the mountain. The gardens are built in an old cement quarry.

Because we travelled back on June 22, we got to see the Midnight Sun. This picture is out the window of the plane at about 23:30 Eastern time.

The sun can still be seen to the north. Of course, we didn't get to see an Northern Lights because it was still bright.

My Eastern Adventure

Earlier this month, I headed off to New Brunswick to visit my elder son. I had a couple of things that I wanted to do while I was there, this time.

The sky as I boarded the plane had a promise of nice weather.

The first item on my agenda was to eat a lobster roll on the beach.

The lobster roll was so large I didn't eat another thing that day, and I didn't finish my fries. However, it was really good.

This is the beach at Aboiteau,

The picture doesn't show it, but in the distance you can see Prince Edward Island.

It was a gorgeous day, and I enjoyed my ocean visit.

The other thing I wanted to see was the monument to the RCMP officers killed in the line of duty in 2014.

They will now stand on guard forever.

The bases of the statues tell you a bit about the officers.

Around the base are maple leaves with signatures of all the other first responders who were involved in keeping Moncton safe, that awful day.

It is a very moving monument.

Much of the rest of my time was spent visiting, and enjoying family time with my far away kid and his fur babies.

An Eastern Adventure

I flew on Mr. Porter's Airline, to deliver my quilt from last week. It was a quick visit, with some fun thrown in.

On Saturday, my grandkittens were in a fashion show.

Don't they look excited about being in their Halloween costumes?

The weather was beautiful on Sunday, so we went Geocaching.

You can score a cache find if you manage to get a picture of the Tidal Bore coming in, with your GPS in the picture. The last time I was in Moncton, I missed the picture by about 5 minutes. This time, I got it.

The tidal bore is that light brown line, in the river, near the top of the picture.

I had the opportunity to have coffee with one of my quilting heroes, Karen Neary. I have made 3 of her patterns and she has made me love paper piecing (instead of fearing it).


Of course, I couldn't come home without some New Brunswick yarn.

Turtlepurl Yarns are dyed in Hillsborough, NB. I bought this skein at Cricket Cove in Moncton. The colourway is called Angry Birds.

It was a fun weekend. Now I am home, and back to my usual routine.