What to do in Canada on Labo(u)r Day Weekend

This past weekend, Michele, Sedwick, and I headed up to Canada. Now that Sedwick knows where the dropzone is :), he wanted to visit it again. Plus, there was a CRW gathering. And we had some left over Canadian currency, so it was off to Canada we went.

On Fri, we headed for Gatineau, which is just outside of Ottawa. There was a hot air balloon festival there, and there were reputed to be lots of artisans. Michele was hoping a wood carver guy we'd seen in Quebec would be there. However, while we did get to see about 25 hot air balloons take off (which was very cool to see), for some reason a red flag was put up, which meant (we learned from the announcer person) that the weather wasn't right for ballooning. We were a little puzzled about that, since the weather seemed to be perfect (and the announcer had even said it was perfect weather during his initial announcements). And, there was no wood carver from Quebec. There were, oddly, stripper poles for sale, but very few artisans. So the festival was both fun and a little bit of a disappointment all at the same time.

That night, we found a hotel (Motel Joliette) that was straight out of the 50s, complete with a 50s car out front. But it was clean and reasonably priced, and had wifi from the neighbor, and just a 10 minute ride to the dirt road that lead to the dropzone, so we were set.

Sat, Michele and I had originally planned to go to Ottawa, but Fri had shown us that that's a decent drive away, and we were a little sick of driving. Instead, we did what apparently every other person in the area does on the Sat of Labour Day, and headed to apple orchards. We got apple cider, apple donuts, apple cookies, and apple ice wine (we haven't tried that last yet, but the others were pretty good).

Sun, we headed for small towns in the Laurentines. We tried to see about 6, but found about 3. When McTommy (Michele's GPS) told us we'd arrived at a few, there didn't seem to be much there. In particular, one town (Esterial) seems to be comprised of an intersection, a golf course, a hotel, and a city hall. Oh - and a fun curvy road that, when is driven quite quickly (as Michele did the first two times we were on it (the third time we were behind a slow car), feels like a roller coaster. We managed to find two promising towns - one where we had quite tastey cappuccinos (with chocolate shavings on top) and discovered that the salesperson has the same taste as Michele (she owns the same sweater and purse that Michele bought), and I got some cute tiny purses. We also found another promising town that, sadly, was closing once we found it (because of the detour to the town that didn't exist). But that gives us something to do the next time we go up to our neighbors to the north. All in all, it was quite a fun weekend.