Ottawa is a special place.  I’ve been visiting our country’s capital since as far back as I can remember, for such a wide variety of reasons.  Whether it was a stop along the way while visiting family, a school trip into the parliament buildings, or the many, many trips for band competitions throughout high school,  it’s a city that holds an interesting place in my heart.  It’s also, for me anyway, not like going to Toronto in the way you’d think of going to a ‘big city’.  Perhaps because of the bilingualism, or the aforementioned political importance, but for whatever reason, and despite it being perhaps the most ‘Canadian’ city, anytime I go there it feels like I’m going somewhere exotic.  More like a vacation than a drive in to the city.  Which is in no way a complaint; quite the contrary, really – it’s something exciting to look forward to, and now that we have family there once again, we’ve got more reasons to go!

Last year we decided to start a new tradition of making the trip to Ottawa over the Family Day weekend.  It works out nicely as a way to connect and celebrate our Christmas outside of the usual chaos that tends to accompany the traditional holiday season, and as bonus it just so happens to fall on a weekend that Winterlude takes place, so there is some extra fun in the air and adventures to explore.  The journey to get there, of course, is long, but the girls have always been great little traveler, and this year in particular was a game-changer with only 2 pee breaks along the way!  That may not sound like a big deal, but to equate that into hours, our trip went from 9 hours in the van, down to 5 and a half.  It’s amazing what another year older can do.

That said, I’ll also say that we’ve gotten pretty slick at knowing what to pack into the car to avoid meltdowns at very strategic times – snacks, colouring sheets, audiobooks; we have an arsenal of supplies and distractions to get us through long distances.  The trick is not to show them what you have in your goody bag at the beginning; surprise them at the right moment and peace will be restored.  I will credit my incredible wife for encouraging the investment in bluetooth headphones and the audible account for just such occasions.  The inclusion of these things in our trips had paid off in two very notable ways:

1. The kids are devouring books without getting car sick.  We’ve also got them loaded up with their own playlists, so when the books are done, it’s a Swiftie party until the cows come home.
2. We in the front seat can not only listen to whatever we want to (including the sweet, sweet joy of complete and total silence), but we also aren’t subjected to repeat playlists and the constant interjections of:

Kid 1: “can you please turn it up?”
Kid 2: “can you please skip this song?”
Kid 1: “Daddy, can I please mumble mumble mumble…”
Dad: “Sorry, sweetie, I can’t hear you because the music’s too loud, I’m going to turn it down.”
Kid 1:”but Daddy, now I can’t hear it!!!”
Dad: “But kiddo, I can’t hear your question.”
Kid 1: “I NEED TO HEAR IT THOUGH!”
Kid 2: “Sister, stop yelling, I can’t hear the music.”
Dad turns up the music to drown out the yelling
Kid 1: “you still didn’t answer my question!”
Mom (for the win) turns down the music, pulls out a mystery bag from under her seat: “girls, who wants a snack?”

Yes, it has taken 8 years and thousands of kilometres, but I think we’re starting to figure out the travel tactics for success.

Beyond the time spent in the van, it was actually a pretty phenomenal year all around when it came to the art of moving forward.  Those of you with littles of your own know how difficult it can be to get places on time, or even just keep a momentum going.  Kids tend to enjoy the journey more than us adults do, and they can find adventure or cause for delay in just about anything.  That’s typically not a negative thing, but when there’s an appointment or an agenda, or a bus waiting to take you to school, it can be rather frustrating as a parent when, instead of putting on their socks, they decided that it’d be fun to see if those socks could be used as parachutes for their dolls, so that takes up 10-minutes and at least one doll-repair surgery, and then when they finally do get them on their feet, along with the rest of the winter gear (a task that took 37-minutes to complete), they then decide that they need to find the special purse that they got for their birthday three years ago that is buried ‘somewhere’ up in their bedroom but of course they can’t remember where (which is your fault as a parent) because they haven’t used it or even given it a single thought in the past 365 days, yet now is the absolute critical time that they need to have it so that they can collect rocks along they way to wherever it is that we’re going so that they can paint the rocks when they get back home which is just going to result in a mess of art supplies that will never get cleaned up and rocks that will never get touched again until, two months from now when they’re invited to a birthday party and they decide that the gift they want to give is a handful of the hand-painted rocks that they worked so hard on, until you tell them that you got rid of them, so that will result in an upheaval  of the house that you can’t do anything to fix but in the back of your mind you know could have been entirely avoided had they only put on their socks…ugh.   sorry, what was I saying?   Oh, yeah – we didn’t experience any of that this time!  Somehow we made it places early, we were the first in line, which meant we got to experience the slides, the zip line, the obstacle course, all before the crowds arrived, and no one had a meltdown!  Huge parenting win!

All in all, Ottawa is a fun place to visit, and I’m loving how we get to do it as a family.  It felt like a bit of a precursor to Disney in a way.  We practiced patience, planning and preparing ourselves to spend way too much money on food. Which, I have to say is maybe the one thing I do miss at this stage of life.  Food is a passion for me, and venturing out to restaurants in another city is one of my favourite ways to explore.  I love experience complex flavours and ‘new’, which is not quite what kids have in mind when it comes to eating, but I know that will come in time.  The extent of which we explored was lunch out at Tuckers Marketplace, and while the kids were fine with it, my blood is still boiling at the fact that our bill for the just the four of us to eat lunch came to $175.  I have so much to say about buffets…

But lets end on a happy note: the travel was great, the experience was a joy, Spraks Street was awesome, with it’s free Tim’s, fire juggling acts, picture perfect snowfall, and art installations.  The canal even opened up for a few hours and though it wasn’t great for skating, we were able to take in a truly Canadian experience walking alongside so many other happy people.   I look forward to doing it all again next year.