A blissful weekend in Ottawa

This past weekend I ventured, once more, to Ottawa to spend the weekend with Chris. All the traveling (Ottawa, Ottawa-Toronto-Montreal and back, and then Ottawa again...) has been a bit tiring, but each weekend is filled with so much fun stuff that despite being exhausted on Monday mornings it's all well worth while.

This past weekend was no different. The weather was nice most of Saturday and all of Sunday and we tried to make the most of it, soaking in the last warm days of the year. A lot of hanging out in the market, walking and rollerblading along the river and canal and a tinny bit of shopping all added up to a perfect end to the summer season.

As some of you may know, Chris has a 22 km bike ride to work, most of which is along a paved bike path running parallel to the Ottawa River. Since Sunday was such a gorgeous day, we grabbed our rollerblades and headed out to get some fresh air. We took the path towards Chris' work since he insisted that there was something neat along the way that he wanted to show me. Despite the CRAZY wind, we pushed on and after about 2 hours came to this spot:


Behind Chris you can see a series of rock structures. It didn't take long before we took off our rollerblades and went exploring amongst the rocks. Turns out that there is an artist who puts these up without using any binding agent. He just finds the perfect center of gravity and manages to balance the rocks, often using little ones as anchors. Naturally they fall down ever so often, especially on windy days like that one, but he returns frequently to arrange them in some new and interesting way. Naturally, we came equipped with a camera and I had a fantastic time snapping shots. Here's a small sampling:

The Inuksuk

It looks like the rocks in the foreground are huge, but in fact they are only about a food high. A really cool shot nonetheless. Apparently if I had an SLR, both the foreground and backgound would be in focus. One day...

Looks like a bird on top of a rock :)

We've seen something like this before in San Francisco a few years back; there was a man doing the same thing on the beach near the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. I have to say that I liked the Ottawa version of this form of art a bit better, though the backdrop was not as nice as in San Fran, the structures themselves were much more interesting and the actual location was nicer too; because the level of water in the river was high many of the figures were standing in water. Very cool.

On the way back we stopped along the way to take some more pictures (in case you didn't notice, I really like taking pictures... especially of puffins...)

Chris speeding along. Can you tell how windy it is?

A picture up a 'fruit' tree.

Along our path we met a baby squirrel and after waiting for about 10 minutes, he was kind enough to look right at the camera.

More colourful trees.

This upcoming weekend I'm staying put in Montreal. We are having a in-house MTB race (basically a time trial up Mont Royal) on Saturday and I'm going to try to catch up with a friend as well as do some school work which has quietly been piling up for a month. Then after that, the next two weekends in a row I will be in Toronto and KW so again more commuting. After that though, I'm not leaving Montreal till at least Christmas, so if any of you want to see me, you're going to have to make the trip up! :)