We stayed two nights in Ottawa, one night on the outskirts of Ottawa in Dow Lake, and then pushed on, soon leaving the city and suburbs behind us. There are 49 locks separating several lakes and rivers that make up the Rideau Canal which rambles from Ottawa to Kingston. So far, we’ve been through 42 of them. We are one day away from Kingston, two if we don’t feel like traveling very far tomorrow.
All but two of the locks so far were motorized. All the rest were hand-operated, as were many of the opening bridges, by Canada Parks personnel. These employees are mostly young, all smiles, filled with pride over their knowledge of the locks and the surrounding areas, and eager to answer questions or give you a hand. They ask how far you plan to travel today and call ahead to the next lock to let them know you’re coming. Many times we’ve moved from one lock into the next without waiting, and the times we have had to wait averages less than thirty minutes. All the parks and docks and restrooms (they call them washrooms) are well maintained and open to the public, and there often is an audience watching you lock through. While we are being lifted or dropped, people will stand on the side to watch and often call out questions about how far we’re coming and where we’ve been. Little kids will wave. People will point out the cat if Tommie shows up in the doorway. It’s been a lot of fun being lock ‘celebrities.’
The day we left Dow Lake (Friday June 23) we moved into a narrow area lined with maples and spruces and the occasional ‘cottage.’ We went through seven locks and decided to call it a day in a little town called Burritt’s Rapids, tying up at the dock after the eighth lock of the day. This town is on a very small island and has a few historic stone houses and a short trail called the Tip to Tip trail (one end of the island to the other, lengthwise) which goes from the lock through town and to a view of the dam on the other side of the island. It wasn’t a very long trail, but it was a good leg-stretcher.
Saturday we cruised on past the towns of Merrickville and Smiths Falls (13 more locks) and through the lock at the area of Poonamalie to stay on the seawall there. Poonamalie was so named by a Royal Engineer who had worked on a site in the Tamil region of India and means ‘cat hill.’ There is little here beyond the lock and its surrounding park, but it too had tourists and bicyclists and picnickers like all the other lock parks. These waterways so far had been rivers and canal cuts, decorated with duckweed and lily pads, the shores lined with maples and weeping willows. Really, they could be anywhere in the US. It does seem odd to be traveling along knowing there is no ocean outlet coming up, and there are no tides.
Sunday we left the narrow winding rivers to enter the Rideau lakes. These a large, deep lakes with many islands and are very popular with Ontarians. Lots of recreational boaters on these lakes, as well as people out fishing. We made a lunchtime stop at Col. By Island. Col. By is the man who designed and oversaw the creation of the entire canal. Every town has a By street. Ottawa was first named Bytown. This island had been privately owned for years until it was sold to the Canada Parks system and renamed Col. By Island. We’d been told it was a must stop. There happened to be space, so we stopped. We did the perimeter walk in about fifteen minutes, mindful of the poison ivy which was everywhere. At one point on the trail Dan remarked about the oddly shaped trees and wondered if there had been an ice storm in the 1980s. Then we came across a sign detailing how a tornado cut a swath through the middle of the island. That explained the odd curvatures of the trees that survived.
Done with Col. By Island, we set off again. It was a toss up between stopping at Westport or Newboro. One of the locktenders had told us Westport offered hamburgers “to die for” and Newboro had a store called Kilborn’s that offered everything you wanted and things you didn’t know you needed. We opted for Newboro and tied up at the seawall there after having going through that lock. There were only two locks on Saturday.
Kilborn’s was interesting, but it was really a one-stop department store for summer people looking to decorate their cottages. We didn’t find anything there we needed or wanted, but we did enjoy sitting in the porch swing outside. We had hoped for a nice restaurant for dinner, but Newboro only had one restaurant and the menu didn’t interest us. Another time, maybe. So we had supper on the boat (chicken teriyaki on the grill) and watched a map turtle climb the embankment adjacent to us to lay eggs.
Today we left Newboro and began our descent down through the locks towards Kingston. Prior to Newboro all the locks lifted us up, beginning with the 80 foot lift in Ottawa, for a total of 275 feet. Now we descend 166.2 feet to Kingston and Lake Ontario. Today we’ve come down around 90 feet already, the last 60 feet in four locks at Jones Falls. We had contemplated spending the night at the dock in Jones Falls but after walking through the park to see the sights (old dam wall, no Falls because the water has been harnessed in large wooden pipes to feed a hydroelectric plant) we moved on into beautiful Moton Bay, surrounded by stone cliffs to anchor for the night. This could be Maine, and it’s making us a little bit homesick.
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