This past Sunday morning was clear, bright and warm, with a light easterly breeze, a fine late-July day in mid-September. I forsook my usual weekend ride across the river and into the hills, reckoning that the Gatineau Park would be chock-a-block with motorists seeking the widely renowned, but elusive and shy Great Fall Foliage Spectacle. Instead, I took Osi the Raven on a delightful three-hour canter eastwards along the Ottawa River, through the city and out the other side, just less than 50 kms in all.
On the western segment of my ride, I followed the tarmac bike path beside the Ottawa River, heading east toward Parliament Hill, the Rideau Canal, and the National Gallery. At the Gallery, the route joins a city street, Sussex Drive, which runs past the dwelling places of the high and mighty—the Prime Minister’s residence, various embassies, and Rideau Hall, the Governor-General’s residence (being Canajan and all, this is also home to a public skating rink, a ditto cricket pitch, and Sunday evening concerts, where you can picnic on the lawn and listen to the likes of Natalie McMaster dancing with her fiddle.)
Beyond the G-G’s place (the PM and his family are living in the G-G’s gatehouse these days, while his official residence is being renovated—this tells you something about the scale of a mere gatehouse), the road winds past Rockcliffe, a posh suburb sprinkled with cars bearing CD plates, then curls down a rocky bluff onto the Eastern Parkway, towards the Aviation Museum and Ottawa’s eastern suburb, Orléans.
Just here, though, there’s a nondescript, overgrown and barely noticeable sorta-paved narrow road which angles backwards and downhill 50 metres or so to the riverbank itself. This is an access road to a fine old late-19th century wooden building on the waterfront, the home of the Ottawa Rowing Club. (Its members, you can guess, are known as ORCs.) From there, a rider can follow a gravel road eastwards for about 10 or 12 kms, right beside the river. On the right (southern) side, a steep wooded bank rises about 50 metres, providing welcome shade from the sun. It seems that not many people know about this road—on this day, I saw perhaps twenty cyclists, and a few more walkers and joggers, often with young children, infants in strollers, or dogs, and sometimes all of those. The conditions require and reward a relaxed pace; anything hurried would be unseemly. (For speedsters, there is the paved parkway up above, replete with cars and stuff.)
Adding to the pastoral feeling amid an urban population of a million were occasional light planes passing overhead, en route to the small airport attached to the Aviation Museum. Cessnas and the like are (“parked”? “moored”? “stabled”?) there, but also working Spitfires, a Lancaster, and even a few old biplanes. It was oddly reassuring to hear the guttural low-RPM exhaust note of some of these creatures through the trees, a bit like seeing, say, a Brough-Superior or an Excelsior four-cylinder on a ride in the hills.
Photo #1 below shows the road and the woods beside it. I sometime go along here in November—then, everything is wetter and greyer, and there are even fewer people on the path.
There are benches dotted along the landward side of the road, so I stopped for a snack at noon and watched the boats on the river. The easterly had picked up, so there were half-a-dozen sails on the river, which at this point, about 12 kms east of the centre of the city, is about a kilometre wide. One of the sails was a sailboard, tacking back and forth across the river from the Québec side. Most of the craft on the river were powerboats, however. Some were larger and slower, perhaps doing the Montréal-Ottawa-Kingston-Montréal triangular waterway—the Ottawa River, the Rideau Canal, and the St. Lawrence River. Others were smaller and quite a bit faster. As the sailboarder headed back to the Québec shore, s/he was engulfed by a mini-flotilla of 6 or 8 speedboats. As a canoeist, I was dismayed but not surprised at the speedboats’ lack of courtesy – the etiquette requires that power boats cut their speed to “Dead Slow”, to minimize their wake. Ha! – the sailboarder managed it very well, but it must have felt like being in the midst of the aquatic equivalent of a cavalry charge.
A nice brisk tailwind followed me as I turned back to the west. Cyclists and walkers cross the Rideau Canal at the lowest point of the staircase of seven (!) locks, where the Canal meets the Ottawa River.
Photo #2 below shows the view from this splendid spot, at the centre of the city’s waterfront: Across the river to the north is Douglas Cardinal’s magnificent design, the beautiful Museum of Civilisation (as I insist on still calling it, despite it being renamed the “Museum of History” by the previous federal gvt – gimme a break, any museum deals with history, by definition); up above on the right is the status of Champlain, not waving but shooting the stars with his astrolabe; between Champlain and the Museum of Civ is the Alexandra Bridge, the old railway bridge named after one of Vicky-and-Albert’s brood, which now handles motor traffic, as well as a lot of cyclists and walkers on a broad roadway of wooden beams. Further to the right, not visible in this photo, is the National Gallery, Moshe Safdie’s splendid design. Up above to the left (west) are the Parliament buildings, with the markers of the Peace Tower and the cupola of the library. Further west still is the fine stone of the Supreme Court, looking properly august, even in September. (Photos of those to come after a future ride, letting me photograph them from the north side of the river.)
Continuing west from downtown, a rider reaches the Remic Rapids, the middle of the three sets of rapids in this stretch of the Ottawa River. On the southern side of the river, a convenient wide shelf of shale rock protrudes into the shallows and provides the foundation for an exhibition of rock sculptures. (Photo #3 below.) This is a citizen’s initiative, the work of one artist. John Ceprano has been doing this every year since the mid-1980s. He rebuilds his creations every year, after winter’s snow and ice and the spring flood rearrange the previous lot. His work has gained such a following among locals and tourists—and of course the Canada geese, although they don’t vote—that the city gives him a yearly grant to support his exhibition. Not for the first time, too, a good idea has morphed into an NGO—this one is Ottawa Rock Art.
Next door to the balancing rocks (which, it must be said, are not a patch on those in Zimbabwe’s Matopos Hills—but they are a lot closer) is another sculpture, “Sprout”. (Photo #4.) I quite like the splash of colour and the spiky contrast with the rock art. Will it last through the winter, I wonder? Things not made of rock or sturdy metal tend not to do so well here in the Valley… If you can stand the suspense, stay tuned for a springtime sequel in “Rides of 2019”.
