July 17 - Gatineau Park, Wakefield, Art Museum

 Another hearty breakfast to start our day. We chatted with the owners of the B & B, including Marina, John's wife who gave me some good ideas about communicating with grandchildren. John also talked art - they have collected beautiful art in the B & B. At the dinner this morning was a retired pro baseball player and we got his signature for Hank. He pitched for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1959 and 1960 seasons. It was hard to read his name, so....not sure yet. Anyhow, he was charming and spends half his year at a home in Miami.
   After breakfast we drove over to the massive Gatineau Park across the Ottawa River. We walked down to Pink Lake, a lake that does not circulate oxygen like normal lakes. It is supposedly more green colored in the summer than normal lakes, but it was rather overcast today, so it just looked like a lake to us and certainly not pink as it can evidently look at some times during the year. After driving around, we drove along the river to the little artsy-crafty village of Wakefield, a place recommended to us by Cassi. We couldn't find a place to eat that appealed to us, so we drove back into Ottawa and went to the National Gallery of Art.
   The National Gallery is beautiful. The building was built since we lived there, so it was all new to us. We first saw an amazing 100 foot long, double-sided installation. It represented five decades of history and consisted of 16,000 photos cut out from Life Magazine. Each photo was mounted on a separate bamboo-like stick. The sticks were anything from an inch to several feet tall. It was mesmerizing and staggering to think of the work that went into it. We wandered in the impressionist area as we love the Impressionists. After that, we went down a level and took in the Group of Seven, Canadian artists painting in the 1920s and 30s. We really enjoyed this and contemplated buying a print, but talked ourselves out of it as we prefer to buy originals and try to buy from people we actually know.
    By then, we were way past lunch time and hungry. We tried to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant in "our" neighbohood, but it was closed. We ended up at Shwarma Palace where we had - shwarma. I had chicken shwarma and Mark had beef. We also had salad and hummus. It took us back to our time in Egypt. And, it was Eid, so also fitting. (The end of Ramadan.)
    We went back to our wonderful B & B and read the rest of the day away. By this point, it was also raining. I took a wonderful soak in the jazuzzi gazing up at the rain falling on the skylight above me.
   Another wonderful day in Ottawa and we have really relaxed here and totally gotten away.