A MAGICAL WINTRY TOUR IN THE NATION’S CAPITAL
Skating on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal among the highlights of this Travel Canada 150 stop
My daughter’s only question as we left the sprawling museum: ‘Can we stay overnight here?’”
What distinctly Canadian destination is on your bucket list?
With Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation near, it’s the perfect time to discover the travel treasures that lay hidden in your own backyard. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to ski in the Rocky Mountains, canoe in Quebec or whale-watch in Newfoundland? We have six adventures for you to try — all iconic escapes that will get you to the heart of what it means to be Canadian.
We start this six-part series in Ottawa with a skate on the world’s largest rink: the Rideau Canal. Come along throughout the year as we go maple syrup collecting (and eating) in Quebec City, sleep in a yurt in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert National Park, dig up dinosaur bones in Alberta, party in a kitchen in the Maritimes and ride the rails through the Rocky Mountains to B.C.’s Granville Island and Vancouver’s Christmas market.
No matter where you’ve always wanted to go in Canada, now is the time.
We’re here to inspire you.
To the capital
Our skates were a nightmare to pack. Mine were awkward and heavy, while my daughter’s toe picks put holes in our backpack and her helmet was weighty and cumbersome.
But no matter what it took to get our figure skates to the nation’s capital, I was prepared to suffer through it because there would be no better time than Canada’s 150th to make my lifelong dream of skating on the Rideau Canal a reality.
It was with butterflies in my stomach and a burdensome backpack strapped over my shoulders that my daughter, Journey, and I made our way to the largest skating rink in the world.
As Journey chased snowflakes with her outstretched tongue and I watched the wonder that is a child gliding on outdoor ice, the busy world around us stopped moving for a brief moment. We were one with the bridge-adorned canal and one with the thousands of others who had come here daily to partake in this most Canadian of winter traditions: skating on the Rideau.
The only thing better than gliding hand in hand down the 7.8 kilometres of skateway were the treatladen pit stops. At Kilometre 1.4, we enjoyed a piping hot Beaver-Tails pastry coated in cinnamon sugar. At Kilometre 4, we joyously nursed marshmallow-topped hot chocolate and sticky, sweet globs of frozen maple syrup on a stick.
That evening, I snuck back to the Rideau on my own. Under a navy blue sky, I tightened my laces, pulled down my tuque and struck out on the largest expanse of skateable ice on the planet — more than 165,000 square metres, or enough to cover 90 Olympic-size rinks. I heard the comforting crunch of my blades and I felt a little like Elsa in the Frozen movie as she joyfully sings, “let it go” and “the cold never bothered me anyway.”
With only the Rideau’s bridges to cast a shadow on my evening, I careened through historic Ottawa residential neighbourhoods and skated alongside silhouettes just like me, in forms of skaters heading home from work, couples out for an evening date and babies in old-fashioned sleds pushed by their parents.
With blushed cheeks and invigorated legs, I breezed back to the hotel a lighter version of myself, a version who had lived one of her lifelong dreams. While I was sure that skate on the light-lined Rideau Canal, which is cleaned by scraper at night and flooded over by the canal waters themselves, would be the highlight of our trip, I was partly wrong.
The Canadian Museum of Nature greeted us with a four-storey-high jellyfish and led us to its interior of wonder. We spent five hours and a delicious lunch hour at this glorious museum filled with a life-size family of triceratops, living snakes, spiders and fish, and a skeleton of a blue whale (measuring almost 20 metres).
The interactive displays in the seven separate and expansive galleries allowed my daughter to poke her head out from under an iceberg to see an enormous stuffed polar bear. She walked through a stalactite-laden cave and looked into the eyes of a Gila monster, a venomous lizard native to the United States and Mexico.
My six-year-old daughter’s only question as we left the sprawling museum was simply this: “Can we stay overnight here?” I felt the same.
Our spectacular daytime adventure was surprisingly matched by an equally spectacular evening walk and concert as part of Ottawa’s annual Winterlude festivities. The three-weekend event, which started Feb. 3 this year and ran until Feb. 20, presented us with startling ice sculptures to observe and climb, a colourful kids’ ice castle to help build and a front-row spot at an evening concert by Thunder Bay, Ont.’s Coleman Hell that featured flaming ice sculptures and uplifting music to fill Ottawa’s Confederation Park.
Daytime Winterlude activities across the Ottawa River took us the short bus ride to Gatineau, Que. (the free Sno-Bus shuttle conveniently runs every 15 minutes to major Winterlude events and locations). In the city’s Jacques-Cartier Park, the site of Snowflake Kingdom, we enjoyed dogsled rides, thrilling ice slides and more maple syrup on a stick (we discovered during our visit that it is impossible to consume too much maple syrup when it’s frozen to a Popsicle stick).
When it was time for a warmup, we crossed the street from the park and explored the kid-friendly Canadian Museum of History with its destination-worthy Canadian Children’s Museum. The pamphlet suggests allowing three hours for the Children’s Museum — we say allow three days. Both my daughter and I loved every interactive moment of this miniature world tour, which took us inside of a pyramid in Egypt and into a market in Holland (complete with tulips, cheese and wooden shoes — in our exact sizes). In between the passport stamps my daughter got at every village, we made our way into a rickshaw in India, onto a cargo ship in a Canadian harbour and onto a pint-sized theatre stage, complete with costumes and makeup room, in England.
After each day of our incredible journey through Ottawa, we’d collapse into the crisp white sheets of our centrally located Marriott Hotel and thank the lucky stars above that we had the good fortune to be in Canada’s capital city.
And any trip to a national capital region should surely include a trip to the governing centre, and so it was that we found ourselves warming our hands by the Centennial Flame on the grounds of Parliament Hill. As snowflakes gently fell, we reflected on what a wondrous privilege it is to be Canadian and to be able travel in our own backyard on this year of Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation.