Here are the chronicles from our trip to Ottawa! It was quick trip, up on Friday and back on Monday but we packed a lot of fun in that short time! We stayed at a hotel right in downtown Ottawa with the Bethune’s. It was a convenient location to walk and drive anywhere we wanted to go. Our first morning we ventured out and walked to Parliament Hill. It was a cold morning but the sun certainly made it better! After arriving we decided to go inside for the official tour. It was a fabulous 40 minute tour that included the House of Commons and the Senate rooms as well as many other areas inside the building. Here we are kicking off our trip with a silly selfie in the car. 
We also spent some time visiting with Don and Di at their home which was a convenient 10 minutes from our hotel. The kids had a lovely time playing with some new toys given to them by Don and Di. Finn certainly loves his caterpillar scooper truck. We had a nice dinner at a Bistro – and each of the kids were given two mini-canisters of play-dough to have fun with during our visit! How fun, I haven’t ever experienced a restaurant giving anything other than crayons and paper! It certainly did the trick and the kiddos had a fun time with it. We were also fortunate to celebrate Don’s birthday with pizza and cake on our last night there! 
Another exciting adventure was skating on the Rideau Canal! The canal was a quick walk from our hotel, less than 10 minutes. Kevin and I were able to borrow Amy and Andy’s skates and we rented a fun sleigh for Finn to ride in. It was a chilly day, in the mid-twenties with not much sunlight. The canal is about 4 miles long, though we didn’t venture nearly that far! We skated around for awhile and decided to make it down to the 1 km mark. We skated for about an hour and fifteen minutes with a mini-break toward the end to enjoy our first ever beaver tail (think elephant ear). We went with the traditional cinnamon sugar and it was delish! Finn certainly loved it. I must say I was pretty proud of myself as it was my first time on skates and I was able to carry on taking photos while skating with my hot chocolate! Neither Kevin or myself fell, which was quite nice, and we both were able to skate at a pretty fast pace, especially when pushing the sleight. By the end Finn was super tired and took an hour nap in the car on our way to MEC, a large Canadian sporting store similar to REI in the US. We enjoyed a nice lunch and our first experience of Poutine, which are french fries, topped with gravy and cheese curds. It was quite delish!
We enjoyed a tasty caramel-apple crepe at the mall near our hotel too 🙂
On our return trip we decided to make a stop at Niagara Falls. We had heard they were frozen so we figured we weren’t going to be much closer than we already were so why not check it out! The sun came out during our visit so we were able to catch a couple of cool photos of a rainbow! It was quite chilly and windy and the closer we got to the falls there was a mist in the air too. Captured a couple of faces that depict how we were feeling at times. 
