Wanderung 7

Ogling Ottawa and Ontario's Outstanding Outdoors

September 2004

September 20 - Volksmarch in Westboro - Ottawa, Ontario

We awoke to a sky covered with a light layer of clouds, and I was glad that we had toured Ottawa the previous day when we had the clear blue sky as a backdrop for our pictures. Still, it was a reasonably bright day and not raining, so we read over the Year Round Event offerings of the local club and settled on a walk out of Westboro, an eponymously named borough slightly to the west of Ottawa. The starting point was a coffee shop on Richmond Road that was fairly near the Ottawa River, and we figured that we could walk for a couple of hours, have lunch somewhere, and then ride our bicycles along the bike trail on the shore of the river for a bit.

When we arrived in Westboro we found that the street in front of the coffee shop was being repaired, but after a short search we found some 3-hour free parking on the next street over and left the truck there. After finding the start box in the coffee shop, we settled in with a freshly brewed mug of coffee and looked at the two routes offered for this walk, one of which was a big 11-kilometer loop to the south that traversed an experimental farm station. The other route consisted of two 5.5 kilometer loops, one to the south through a couple of parks and one to the north that had a segment along the Ottawa River. Since we really wanted to see the river, we chose the latter and signed up for it in the logbook.

The loop to the south started off along a winding path in kind of a strip park alongside the road and then went through a variety of neighborhoods ranging from normal suburban neighborhoods to some pretty swanky ones. The high toned neighborhood was home to at least two embassies, Mexico and Peru, but I imagine that was the result of having a wealthy neighborhood with nice homes rather than the cause of it. The Mexican embassy had a lintel from a Mayan temple standing in their front yard, and it was the real article. The engravings were still remarkably sharp for being around 1200+ years old, and the plaque at the base explained that the scene depicted a handover of power from one "jaguar" king to another. Whether this was a peaceful transition of governments or a forceful shift in power I do not know, but the scene depicted appeared to be a peaceful scene.


 

Right after the Mexican embassy we curled back through a nice looking park with paved, lighted trails. We only got to see a small corner of this park, and I did wish the route had taken in more of those nice trails. But as it was we zigzagged back through the city streets and another small pocket park to Richmond Road and then turned back to the east to walk along a paved path in the median strip and return to the finish point. There we greeted the young women who had served us coffee earlier, took a bathroom break, and headed off on the second loop.

The second loop began with a simple walk east on Richmond Road, and I counted 4 outdoor equipment stores in a 4 block span, all selling kayaks, canoes, tents, and other heavy duty camping equipment. That was quite a remarkable concentration, and I imagine it would make shopping for gear somewhat more convenient as you could be relatively sure that one of the four stores would have the brand and model you wanted. We also saw several antique stores and a nice old town hall made of carved blocks of stone. An older gentleman came out while I was taking a picture of that and told me that the bell had been stolen from the bell tower, which sure enough was lacking any bell. He said that back in the old days Westboro used to be a small shopping district for the farmers returning home from the farmer's market in Ottawa. Ultimately, the town of Nepean further to the west incorporated Westboro into its city limits and the town hall was converted to other purposes. Some of the folks in Nepean thought that acquiring the borough meant they should also get the bell, and they came along one night, stole the bell from the steeple, and took it back to Nepean where it remains to this day. That, at least, was his story about the skullduggery afoot in the good old days, and it was certainly entertaining as he told it although whether it was true or not I cannot say.


 

After the business district kind of petered out we turned north toward the river and then west. The segment west was beside a sunken roadway dedicated solely to buses; it had bus stations every 1-2 kilometers exactly like train stations. Effectively, the main trunk of the Ottawa public transportation network out to the west was a kind of "bus train" where buses came every few minutes. I wondered why they did that instead of light rail or heavy rail systems, but I would guess that they thought the buses would be cheaper. I would have been fascinated to see the line by line cost comparison of the two approaches, however, because in the Washington, D.C. area the governments have pretty much uniformly bought into the concept of a heavy rail system. Baltimore, Maryland, on the other hand, has a light rail or trolley type of system and that seems to work for them. One thing I could not quite grasp was the construction of that sunken road. Clearly it had been blasted into the bedrock and I just thought that removing all that rock must have cost a pretty penny. However, it is also possible that they used a pre-existing channel such as an old boat canal or railroad bed to put in that dedicated bus road. By the way, they also had dedicated bus only lanes on the 417 interstate road through the city, so clearly this express bus network was fairly extensive. Monika felt that most of the buses were quite full, so the system was apparently fairly well patronized also.

At the end of the bus street the buses had to join normal streets and our walking path joined the riverside hiker biker path. For the next couple of kilometers until we turned at a Unitarian Church we had almost constant views of the Ottawa River, which in that area was broad and calm. The Unitarian Church turned out to be only a very short block north of Richmond Road, which we took to return to the finish point passing another World War I memorial along the way.

As we neared the finish point we stopped into to a store selling rugs and beautiful melted glass art objects from Iran, of all places. I was fascinated by the glass pieces; they had very nice color combinations and quite graceful shapes. Unfortunately, most of them were simply too big for the limited display area we have at home, so we settled on a candlestick made from a core of cobalt blue glass surrounded by clear glass. The stem had incised grooves spiraling up and down, and glass leaves with cobalt blue edges curled into the air just below the socket for the candle. That may sound a bit garish, but we thought it was exquisitely and gracefully done, so we bought it for $15 Canadian and took it with. I also chatted with the proprietor about Westerners traveling in Iran, and he encouraged me to do so. He said that the folks were pretty much all friendly and open and did not bear any ill will to individual Americans. Given the strained relationship between the two countries since the fall of the Shah, that's saying something. He also said that Farsi, the national language, does have regional dialects that make understanding folks from the different regions rather difficult. An intriguing idea to travel in a land like that to see the land and the people as well as act as some sort of informal good will ambassador between the two countries. Mind you, I don't want to travel where there is a decent chance of being shot at or kidnapped, I have some values after all, but he reassured me that Iran was not like that.

We ended our walk back at the coffee shop and decided to have lunch there before taking our bicycle ride. For the bike ride we drove the truck over to the Unitarian Church to see if we could park there so that we would have almost our entire ride along the river rather than on city streets, and that worked out for us. The church had a large, empty parking lot and I could not see that we would hurt anything by parking there for a couple of hours. If necessary I would have gone in and said "Hail, Whatever, Wherever, and However!" three times figuring that would be close to a Unitarian "Hail Mary", but religious participation turned out to not be required to use the parking lot. Still, I felt vaguely guilty as we unloaded the bikes from the truck, donned our helmets, and pedaled off onto the bike path. It was some kind of half formed doubt about using a religious parking lot for non-religious purposes, which is not very logical I admit. The one common vestige of strong religious training that I have found among people of quite different faiths is that guilt thing, which I suppose serves some useful function in life, but at other times can just be a royal pain.

Enduring my guilt Stoically (yet another religion!), we pedaled eastward on the bike path in the direction of Parliament, hoping to get some pictures of it from the shore of the river. We had a wonderful ride in the cool fall air along the wind-ruffled river, stopping to take pictures, of course, whenever we saw anything interesting. At one point there was a collection of stone sculptures in the river that seemed to be taking the idea of stone cairns to an artistic extreme. I mean, I even saw two porpoises playing with a ball as one of the sculptures, which is probably not something the Inuit who originated the old cairn markers would have done. You know, though, the Innuit stories I have read do indicate at least a sense of the bizarre if not of humor, so maybe they did design those sculptures. Hard to say.

We also passed an old hydroelectric power plant from a feeder stream to the Ottawa. The plant itself was renovated in 1888 or thereabouts as I recall, but the really interesting thing was that I caught sight of a kayak racing course in the outflow channel from the plant. I probably would not have recognized it if I hadn't recently wasted a couple of weeks of my life watching the summer Olympics, but there were the telltale gates for the kayaks consisting of pairs of vertical poles hanging down just above the water's surface. No one was practicing when we rode by, but it seemed like a nice practice run for the Canadian team.


 

Ultimately we made it almost, but not quite, to the Parliament building because the path at that point was closed while they performed renovations that included doing some kind of work on the cliff. So, we had no "back door" view of the Parliament building on this trip, but across the river from where we stopped we did see some of the city landmarks such as the Basilica and the National art museum. I had walked past them so frequently in the last couple of days that they almost seemed like old friends now!

The ride back to the truck went faster since we had run out of space on the camera's chip to store pictures. But at the end we rode another kilometer or so up the road and then turned off to work our way back to the Unitarian Church. I chucked the bikes back into the truck and we headed back to camp, stopping to replenish our food supplies at a Loeb store, where I was overjoyed to find freshly baked raisin bread for $0.99 Canadian per loaf (we bought 2 loaves). That plus some Danish rolls on sale gave us a solid basis for Kaffeetrinken, which inevitably led to Abendessen in the usual German fashion (see Wanderungs 2 and 5). Between meals we put our feet up and worked on the computers, each in his fashion, and a good time was had by all. The after dinner entertainment was a campfire where we completed burning the wood we had collected at that campground, a new ecological rule for us, and then we retired to the trailer to finish "Angels & Demons", which had an appropriately slam bang ending with a surprise twist, rather on the O. Henry model. Reading something that exciting really does make it hard to get to sleep, however, and I know that I spent some time tying all the loose ends of the book together in my mind before I could really sleep.

Copyright 2005 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Map
Prolog
September 2004
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Epilog

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