Don’t feed the monkeys

This abbreviated post mostly is about the Ottawa Locks spectacle, or as we call it, the Giant Pain in The Butt.

This flight of locks promised to be challenging but fun, with a bevy of on-lookers admiring all the pretty boats going up and up and up.  At the end of this post lives a 98-second video of all eight locks, taken with the mistaken belief that mounting the GoPro facing backwards would produce an awesome look down.  Meh.  But first, we had to get to Ottawa.

Yesterday was a brilliant travel day, in both the British and the American sense of the word.

Mostly smooth.   Mostly cloudless.  Reasonably cool.  Totally awesome.  Not much to see, however, although along the Ottawa River there’s what in Canada counts as a beach.

Then on into Hull Marina, which technically is our last stop in Quebec but it’s basically in Ontario, just like Liberty Landing technically is in New Jersey but it’s basically in New York.

The idea was to get over to the blue line for the 9 a.m. first lock through.  Yeah, about that.  The good news is that we avoided the buses.

The bad news is that eight boats beat us there.  Boats were rafted.  Boats were on the red line, which is reserved for ferries and such.  Well this sucks.

As a result, we waited nearly two hours and the trip to the top took us nearly three hours, the combination of which sapped all of our desire to explore Canada’s Capitol.  Ken from Nice Goin’ took a picture that made it look like we were having fun—and we put on a happy face for the tourists who lined the enclosure where we were on display like zoo animals—but mostly it was just hard work.

We ended up on the wall with no shore power, but that’s become the new normal so no big deal.

The other thing is that today most of Canada has been without internet, crippling much of the economy.  True fact.  So restaurants and shops either are closed or only taking cash.  And our supply of money with Queen Elizabeth on it is very limited.

Anyway, it took some doing to figure out the GoPro again so we might as well include the video.

Next post will include some tidbits about Ottawa.  Maybe they’ll even be interesting.