So I made it to Ottawa in one piece and left a little broken!!

I left Moffat on Friday and took a leisurely drive to Ottawa, took me about 7 hours as I kept stopping along the way and took a more scenic route than the main highway there.

I also was mighty impressed with myself as I had downloaded a GPS for my phone to give me directions, thinking that all my driving troubles would be over with this funky little app, however that was not the case. So once in Ottawa I discovered that there was a lot of one way systems, which the GPS didn't seem to understand. I found my hostel quite easily, but alas, I was on the wrong side of the road and to get to the over side I had to follow the one way system around a few blocks before I could get on the right side, the whole time my GPS telling me to do a U Turn on a one way road!!! Other than that it was not a bad little journey and more interesting than some of my other car journeys.

So I was staying in a hostel right in the centre of Byward Market which is the main part of Ottawa. By the time I had got on the right side of the road and checked in, it had already started to get dark. So I took a little wander around the town and bought some food to make at the hostel. I had a fairly relaxed and chilled evening in the hostel, chatting to many people from all over the world and watching rubbish TV.

The next morning I went out with a few people from the hostel, went for a big breakfast and then a free tour around Parliament. The system in Canada is based on the UK parliament system, and as many of you know, I teach this back home so I found this really interesting and got to see the House of Commons, the senate (which is like our house of Lords but they are elected from the provinces) and also went up peace tower, which is their clock tower, a smaller version of Big Ben and took photos of Ottawa.

We spent the afternoon wandering about and then headed back to the hostel! The night started off civilised, watching The Hobbit and chatting to fellow travellers, but then we started on the vodka, between me and another guy, we polished off the bottle and decided to hit the town with a few other people from the hostel.

Well the drinking age here is 19, so obviously I am fine, but there were 2 in our group who were 18, so we got turned away from a couple of places and then it just started to get funny, we were lending out our ID's with pictures on it from Egypt and the UK and the bouncers didn't even batter an eye lid that they were not the same people on the ID's!

So we managed to get into a bar and proceeded to dance the night away and have a whale of a time, as to how the night ended, my friends know so I won't put details on here but all in all, was a hilarious night which resulted in lack of sleep and a mega hangover the next day!!

So breakfast was sought again the next day before driving the couple of hours to Montreal, where I made it safely and will leave this next part for the next blog, catch you all later x