Things are starting to get busy here in Ottawa.
I am about to start my midterm examinations, even though I'm only into week 4 of semester (seriously, the Canadians make us Sydney Uni kids look like great big bludgers.)
Ottawa is also hotting up as the place to be with both the US and the Canadian federal elections happening soon. My residence overlooks Parliament Hill, so I like to think I'm kind of in the thick of things ;)
With all this, and the recent spate of dramas in Gossip Girl (can't help it - exchange has increased my addiction to unbelievably bad extremes), I decided to make an attempt at retreat from all of the hustle and bustle. So I went and stayed in a small log cabin in the middle of nowhere for the weekend.
tada!!
Last Friday evening, myself and a group of six other exchange students piled into the back of a van filled with nothing but hay and speakers playing folk music for an hour long trip through Gatineau Park in Quebec to our home for the weekend – a hand-built cabin in a maple-tree forest. Can you get any more Canadian?
We arrived in darkness with a box of candles and matches, and a pile of wood for the fire. The cabin was tiny, with one armchair, a few stools, a bearskin hanging on the wall, and lots of rusty crockery. After struggling to get even our water boiled so that we could have some pasta and hot chocolate, we decided to go in for an early night. This should have been a simple task except that the cabin had one (also hand-built) double bunk bed. So, we ended up squeezing three of us onto the top bunk, and four on the bottom bunk.
how cute is our little cabin?!
In the morning, we awoke to a dense forest of golden, red and green leaves, and a small gift of fresh eggs left by the cabin's owner. After a bit of exploring, we found a huge lake (Lac Kelly on the map below) with two canoes sitting beside it.
Parc de Gatineau - Lac Kelly is on the far left
I got in the first one with Lauren, Claire and Sarah. But we hadn't been on the lake long when Lauren pointed out that there seemed to be quite a bit of water in the bottom of the canoe. We decided it was only due to the rain and kept on paddling. Five minutes later, there was enough water in the bottom of our canoe in which to have a small bath.
If we were in Australia, where you lucky people still have sunlight (!!), this would not have been a problem. But, it was dreary, wet, windy and starting to get dark. The rest of the group had disappeared, Claire and I were painfully sick with the 'flu, and Sarah was panicking so much that she couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't paddle.
After much talking, plenty of wetness and even more coldness, we finally started the trip back to shore. By the time we made it back, we were wet but triumphant. We had conquered our own small part of the Canadian wilderness (spare me your looks of disbelief, please).
Our log cabin has never looked so welcoming as it did when we finally arrived back. Toasted marshamllows on the bonfire were the perfect end to our first day of kidding ourselves that we were participants in that short-lived reality show where everyone pretends they live in colonial America.
we were also lucky enough to be there in autumn - so beautiful!