travel dates: July 2024
A fun thing about spending a summer exploring Canada is that sometimes you find yourself touring Canada’s historic Parliament building with one other couple from New Jersey, and you both have a lot of questions about Canadian politics. After this aforementioned tour and a lot of time on Wikipedia, though, I have determined that I don’t fully understand the Canadian political system because it’s sort of complicated. I, myself, come from a country where the system of government makes very little sense in many ways, though, so I’m used to such things. Anyway, please don’t ask me any detailed questions about parliamentary government (or, say, “the electoral college: wtf?!”) But I can tell you we loved our stop in Canada’s capital city; it’s a beautiful city with tons to do.
We visited Ottawa as part of an endless series of Canadian cities, and it was kind of sandwiched in between the bigger cities of Toronto and Montreal. So it was interesting because Ottawa’s still a city city, but it’s not as overwhelming large as those two. Mostly what I’m saying here is that parking is a bit of a pain (particularly if you drive a tall van and need surface parking) and yet there aren’t such extensive public transportation options as in bigger cities. Our main hack here is that we found parking a couple of times in the public lot behind the Notre Dame Cathedral, which is very close to the National Gallery and reasonably close to most of the big downtown attractions, if you don’t mind doing some walking. But we also tried it once and found it full, so YMMV. At any rate, leave yourself some extra time to find parking.
Onward to…stuff we did in/near Ottawa!
National Gallery of Canada
As you’ll see whenever I finally get to the end of this trip, we visited both the US and Canada’s capitals on this trip, and fit in the National Galleries of both countries. This is how I know that both National Galleries have a giant spider by sculptor Louise Bourgeois. But I’m pretty sure Canada’s is the bigger one. I’m now a big fan of these spiders and spent an evening trying to figure out if there was a good way to make a replica of one for our yard for Halloween (I could not figure out a reasonable method, though, sadly).
The inside of the National Gallery is pretty great, too. It’s huge and, of course, as is the way with art museums, we did not see it all. Being in Canada and all, we focused on the Indigenous and Canadian galleries.
I liked Frederic M. Bell-Smith’s The Artist Painting Queen Victoria. SO META:
But the coolest part of the National Gallery, hands down, is the Rideau Street Chapel. My friend Shana had told me about this before the trip and urged us to seek it out…and with very good reason. We loved this place! This is a 19th century Gothic Revival chapel that used to be on Rideau Street in Ottawa. In 1972 it was dismantled and rebuilt inside the museum.
Not only does it look really cool, it sounds cool, too. The audio part of the exhibit is the Forty Part Motel, with 40 separate speakers each playing a different voice or part from Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in alium” so that you feel like you’re surrounded by a real choir.
Wandering around/Adventure City Games
We also did one of these outdoor scavenger hunt type games in Toronto, and we found it a good way to do some purposeful wandering and see some areas we probably wouldn’t have found on our own. In Ottawa we picked “Find Justine in Ottawa”–I have no memory whatsoever of the plot or the puzzles we had to complete, but it definitely took us through some great parts of the city.
It started us out in Major’s Hill Park, right across from the National Gallery:
…took us through Byward Market:
Past the Rideau Canal, where we stopped to watch a boat go (very slowly!) through the locks:
…and then eventually took us over to the area where Parliament is.
So, whether you use a scavenger hunt or not, I definitely recommend spending some time walking around in the city.
Zak’s Diner
This fun diner in Byward Market with retro decor was our choice for dinner on our first day in Ottawa. The food was pretty good and the atmosphere was super fun. Also, it rained on us a lot when we left, but that wasn’t Zak’s fault.
Canadian Museum of History
The Canadian Museum of History is across the river in Gatineau, Quebec. It’s a visually stunning building inside and out, both because of the architecture and the setting right on the Ottawa River. I didn’t get a very good picture of said visual stunningness, but here you can see the cool curvy walls at least!
We found street parking easily a couple of blocks from the museum, but Dave had to move the car later because there was a 2 hour limit.
The museum is huge, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to see it all. We started off checking out the incredibly impressive Grand Hall, with its six house fronts representing different Northwest Indigenous cultures.
And then we spent the rest of our time in the Canadian History Hall, a timeline through Canadian history.
Abe was a little disappointed that there weren’t more interactive exhibits, but he did get to design his own Canadian flag at one point.
Timely:
And this was the 4th of July, as referenced back at the beginning of the post, so it was time for our tour of Parliament after this!
Parliament
The main Parliament building, the Center Block, is closed for an extensive renovation until 2032 (!), but there are still a number of (free) ways to tour other parts of the complex. We did two tours, and I think our choices were based largely on what was still available when we decided rather last minute to book the tours. So we ended up doing first the tour of the heritage rooms at East Block, where they have several rooms set up to show what the Canadian government was getting up to back in the 19th century, and then the West Block House of Commons tour, where the House of Commons is meeting while they do all that renovation on the main building. One of our tour guides told us a little about this project; it somehow involves digging all the way under the building and completely redoing the foundation, so I guess it makes sense that it’s going to take forever to finish. There’s going to be a fun underground visitor center when they’re done, though!
These being working government buildings, there’s a good bit of security to go through, so make sure to arrive early. Our East Block tour is the one where it was just us and one other American couple. I believe there are four rooms here that the tour takes you through; the rest of the building is present-day office space.
After this small and fairly laid back tour, I was surprised to find that we were part of a really large group for the House of Commons tour we did after this one. We found this tour the more engaging of the two, perhaps largely because the building is just more interesting, architecturally…and maybe also because current Canadian politics is more interesting to us than 19th century Canadian politics. This is the tour where we learned the difference between a gargoyle and a grotesque (gargoyles are for drainage; grotesques don’t). Spot the grotesque:
They’ve enclosed this former courtyard so that the House of Commons can meet here while they’re building next door is all torn up:
After the tours, we spent some time walking around the lovely grounds and admiring the views. Queen Victoria is all over the place in Canada:
View across the river to Gatineau:
Diefenbunker
The Diefenbunker is a Cold War-era underground complex half an hour outside of downtown Ottawa that was intended to serve as the government headquarters in the event of a nuclear attack on Canada. The name is a pun on John Diefenbaker, the then-Prime Minister who originally commissioned it. I don’t know where the government people are going to go if there’s a nuclear attack now, because today the Diefenbunker is open to tourists and operates as a museum about the Cold War.
Cold War museum by day that is, and….”world’s largest escape room” by night! When we found out about the escape room, we signed right up. There are a couple of different options, but we went with the original “Covert-Ops” game. It looks like things have changed a bit logistically since we were there, so that now you can book a minimum of 4 people, but you have to book for 9 if you want a private experience. I think when we went we had to book (and pay for) a minimum of 6 people. (though we only had 4), and all games were private.
When you book an escape room for the evening, admission to the museum during the day is included. So we toured the museum, went out to dinner at nearby Ridge Rock Brewing Company, and came back for the escape room. Seeing the bunker was really cool. I think I had been expecting something a little more…bunker-like, but really it just felt like a mid-century office building, only with some extra features like a doctors office and a canteen and a pervading sense of doom.
Don’t see THAT in every office building!
They offer guided tours, but we did the self-guided one, and there’s a pretty extensive audio guide you can listen to on your phone to go along with it. In addition to the bunker stuff, there are lots of exhibits about all sorts of Cold War stuff. Life not in a bunker during the Cold War:
Another sign about what Canada thinks of the US:
Also there’s this room where you can pretend there’s a big emergency and you have to make urgent phone calls! This room figured prominently in the escape room later on:
So definitely a fascinating place to visit even without the escape room…but the escape room part was really fun! We got to take over a whole floor of the bunker and realize just how maze-like and confusing the layout was. I was worried it would be too hard for just the four of us, since it was designed for bigger groups, but they have some parts they can eliminate for smaller groups. So we split into teams of two to solve all our puzzles and we made it…with 22 seconds to spare! Phew! (we got some hints. but not many!) I have no pictures from the escape room part of the day. I think we weren’t supposed to take pictures and also there was no time!
As far as kid friendliness…Abe at 11 was fine with both the Diefenbunker itself and the escape room. He would have been frustrated with the escape room if he were with a bunch of other 11 year olds, I think, but with an adult assistant he did well. (and August is amazing at this kind of stuff. I was his partner, and I would have been hopeless without him).
And that was it for Ottawa. I still need to talk about our campground for this stop, and ALSO we’re back from our 2025 summer trip already, so we’re to the part of the year when I’m alternating between two different trips because I’m a slow blogger.
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