Ottawa : Catching up and staying alive

Spent our first two days here in Ottawa catching up with our friends at their house 30k outside of Ottawa. It's been nice to sit back and relax and enjoy their company, but they are off on their own adventure today and we will finally make our way into Ottawa today. They have very graciously loaned us their car so that is going to make exploring a whole lot easier.

Our first stop is the RCMP stables. Here the horses train new rides to participate in the musical ride, a Canadian Tradition since the early 1900's. The horses are beautiful and much larger than I had imagined, the stables are massive and very clean. We are fortunate enough to be able to watch a couple of the new riders getting their horses ready for a training session - reminded me a lot of my younger days at home at the farm. After our tour of the stables, we visit the museum filled with lots of information on the history of the RCMP and the Musical Ride, as well as their present mission in helping to keep Canada safe. Our last stop is to view the original Landau carriage used for the Royal Family and visiting dignitaries.

In the afternoon we visited the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. We spent the rest of the day viewing the many historic and current exhibits showing Canada's many contributions to the aviation industry. We also attended a couple of demonstrations - one on how ejections seats work and a very interesting one on polymers and solid water that was very interesting.

The next day we head back into Ottawa to explore Parliament Hill.  I'm finally getting used to the traffic, now I have to get used to the parking lots!! Where we parked is quite close to Parliament Hill but 3 stories down and very low and narrow. It's a little claustrophobic, I couldn't imagine bringing my truck down here, but you can wash your car here!

We end up spending the entire day here. On arriving, we managed to catch a snippet of the changing of the guard ceremony, but only a due to the huge crowd and very large police presence. Our first stop is the  Supreme Court of Canada, a very understated building full of marble and wood. It is very elegant inside and out, built in the Art Deco Style. Of the 500 appeals requested to be heard, only 50-60 will make it to the Supreme Court. Those are cases in the interest of all Canadians such as a case our guide told us about. One of the employees working here was given a Traffic Ticket in Manitoba, but the ticket was in English only. The Manitoba city is a bilingual city so his case made it all the way to the Supreme Court and he actually won - the parking ticket was dismissed!

We spent the afternoon at Parliament hill visiting, the Peace Tower. We could see the bells of the carillon as our elevator passed them on the way up the Peace Tower. The view was nice and we could see the clock just above us. Next was an interesting tour of the House of Commons, as well as the Senate chamber. Both were very similar to the Ontario provincial building in Toronto. We also visited the Bank of Canada museum to learn all about how they help keep our economy growing and stable, as well as all the effort, spent producing our currency so it can't be easily counterfeited.