Hello Ottawa!

It's true - our mystery trip was to our nation's capital. But before I begin telling you all about the trip, let me first offer an explanation to all the people that we know who live in that fair city about why we didn't visit you. After the craziness that was our life until recently, TC and I really felt the need to get away somewhere for a weekend, just the two of us, so that we could reconnect. The only problem was that we know so many people in Ottawa, if we told them we were coming we'd end up spending the entire weekend visiting. So we decided that this trip was going to be just for us, and we'd do all of our visiting next time. I hope you understand.

Okay, on to the trip! We stayed at a wonderful B&B called McGee's Inn (I would definitely recommend it to anyone and everyone). It was a snowy, cold, wet day when we arrived, but that didn't stop us from going out and exploring the Byward Market - a very touristy area, with lots of interesting shops and restaurants. My favourite? The Tea Store - a wonderful little shop full of every kind of tea imaginable, stored in glass jars that lined one entire wall. I did very well, I think, coming out of the store with only 2 kinds of tea. The first is a bracing organic Assam black tea, and the second a soothing lavendar-mint herbal blend.

On Saturday (an absolutely gorgeous spring day) we went on a tour of the Parliament building, which is where all of the pictures in my last post came from. TC's favourite? The parliamentary library (that's a statue of Queen Victoria in the middle).

Then we walked across a bridge into Quebec and visited the Museum of Civilization - which is a bit of a misnomer. It really should have been called the Museum of Canadian Civilization. Walking through it was kind of like walking through a Canadian history textbook. Unfortunately, I started coming down with a cold on Saturday, so we didn't really do a whole lot else because I had to take things kind of slow, but we had a great time anyway.