Yesterday, for a number of reasons, we had a proper lazy day. We stayed at
Jacqui and Rick’s house all day and didn’t really do a lot of anything other
than play Lego, watch films and drink tea/coffee 
. It was brilliant! I
think George and I really needed the break. So today we had to get out and do
something. We arranged with Becky to take a trip to Merrickville to see a
different kind of quaint local town, so she arrived at 10 to pick us up.
First stop was a Tim Horton’s drive through, and Rosie had only been commenting
a few hours earlier that we hadn’t done that yet! I can’t get over how cheap it
is, we had 2 coffees and a tea and it was only just over $5, and it was
reasonable coffee, amazing! We then made our way out to Merrickville. The first
thing that struck us was the amount of open space everywhere. Given it’s only
just turning to spring, there isn’t much green around, but I imagine that once
the land recovers from the snow it must be beautiful. The whole area is
incredibly flat so we could see for miles in every direction and mainly all we
could see was trees and grassland, with the occasional house thrown in for good
measure. And the houses were massive by our standards (actually many of them
were massive by Canadian standards too), it was definitely great to see the
countryside .
Merrickville is a tiny little town somewhere relatively close to Carleton Place. It is basically a single street with not a lot going on. However, it is a nice little town to visit for us foreigners. On arrival in the town we crossed a raging torrent of a river that was incredibly impressive, and then a few minutes later, my cousin Jon (Becky’s brother) passed us in his work truck, how’s that for an amazing coincidence! He stopped by to say hello, and somehow scared George because he didn’t recognise the coat! Strange child! We continued our stroll through the town and watched some glass blowing before deciding it was time for lunch.
This was a more difficult decision that we had anticipated. There was a chip
truck in the town, and Rosie wasn’t sure about ‘cheating’ on Rick at another
chip truck. Then we weren’t sure about having poutine for the first time from
someone other than Rick. In the end, Rosie had a pulled pork poutine and I had a
chilli dog so that we could have ‘proper’ poutine for the first time from Rick
.
On the way back we drove through some more quaint little towns and over some surprisingly narrow and rickety bridges for the more ‘authentic’ Canadian experience. We then lazed around for the rest of the day, playing Lego, Go Jetters and other random games made up by George.
Tomorrow we are heading into Ottawa, which should be a great day
