After a few days pottering around Peterborough* we borrowed Ash’s parent’s car** and drove off northwards into the Ottawa valley to visit some of her mum’s family, before turning east for Ottawa itself. The scenery went from forest to highland to farmland, and after a stop for an amiable family lunch we hit Ottawa in the late afternoon. We found our rather idiosyncratic hostel — the former Carleton County Jail, no less — dumped our gear in our cell and wandered towards the city centre.

Once past the concrete grimness of the Rideau Centre mall and the apartment blocks under construction on the edge of the downtown, the centre of Ottawa is a very inviting place indeed. We strolled through Byward Market and into Major’s Hill Park, overlooking the gorge through which runs the Rideau Canal. We wandered around the edge of the park, taking in the view: imposing sandstone edifices to the south, the startlingly gothic parliament across the gorge and the glass-and-concrete national art gallery to the north. Something felt slightly off about the all grand old architecture on show, and later on I realised what it was: Ottawa is just too young to have these sort of buildings. Most of the notable ones — the parliament, Château Laurier, the Connaught Building — aren’t more than a century old, far younger than their styles suggested to me. Turns out Ottawa wants to give the impression of age appropriate to a capital city, but doesn’t have the luxury of possessing it.

We pottered around the downtown area a bit more to get our bearings, had a reasonable (if slightly pricey) dinner in the market and then went directly to jail.

The next morning, after showering (private cubicles and shower gel, so fortunately no soap to drop in this prison) we headed back into town to get a bit of cultural sightseeing in. We spent the morning in the Canadian section of the art gallery, which was absolutely infested with security guards — it was more oppressive than the jail/hostel. Fortunately the art, such as I can appreciate, was mostly pretty good.

In the afternoon we jumped on a clichéd but entertaining bus tour and in the evening took a ghost tour to round the night off. The guide actually took us round the hostel itself as part of the tour, but either I’m too old or too cynical to take any notice of this sort of Most Haunted guff and I slept like a log that night.

It’s funny, but I can’t really get an accurate idea of Ottawa down in words. It’s a genuinely nice city: it’s clean, friendly and laden with such culture as befits a national capital, but maybe it’s lacking a bit of grit round the edges to complete the picture. Either way, we had an enjoyable couple of days there before we jumped into the Caddy again to head south to Ash’s old university town of Kingston.

* Notably to Trent University’s über-modernist Bata Library, designed by Ron Thom, and which I rather liked. There’s apparently a rumour that Trent’s suicide rate is second highest in the country because of the all the grey concrete buildings, and that Massey College in Toronto, another Thom campus, has the highest. All very morbidly interesting, but I can’t find anything about it online…

** The car was a big, burbling Cadillac STS in which I proceeded to floor the throttle to peel sideways onto the highway, leaving twin hundred-yard strips of smoking black rubber. Only joking! Happily, despite a tremendous inclination to do just that, I resisted the urge to open ‘er up and instead just enjoyed my first drive in a proper American V8. It certainly ate up the miles, and despite being wrong-wheel drive, I thought it wasn’t bad at all.