Day - Toronto to Ottawa

After enjoying ourselves in Toronto (at Darren's place) we were on the road by 8:40am. It was a little later than expected as we were held up saying our goodbyes to Darren and Derek. Garman assisted us getting out of the city. We took the Don Valley parkway heading north out of the city. By this time the traffic coming in to Toronto was quite heavy. Unfortunately, we managed to get caught up in some heavy traffic for approx. 20 minutes before we were free of the city.

We decided to take the main highway east (401) until Bowmanville and then we turned off to highway 7. This deviation would add extra time to our trip but in reading Tripadvisor it should be more scenic. The trip should take approx. 4.5hours. However, based on previous day's travel, we knew that it would take most of the day with various stops along the way. Again, we had another glorious fine and sunny day.

Travelling along highway 7 was uneventful apart from the occasional other travellers who were in a rush to get from A to B. Fortunately, they have a number of overtaking lanes when we were on single lane highway. We stopped at Silver Lake to stretch our legs. It was a nice location with houses dotted along the shore line. We noticed a number of small fish in the lake - trout? Not sure.

Travelling on further we decided to take a break and grab a coffee. We decided that we would prefer to avoid Tim Horton's (local express coffee outlet - very big in Canada) but we may have to "suck it up" if there was little choice. We managed to find a nice café at Madoc. The coffee was great and the lady who served us was very friendly. She had been to Australia and we had a nice talk while we had our coffee.

We finally arrived in Ottawa in the mid afternoon. As there was still plenty of daylight hours available we went for a walk along the canal all the way to the city and parliament house. We ended up seeing the locks in the canal that allow small boats to move up the canal. As it was late in the day it was not working. We were quite fortunate that our accommodation was quite central. However, in saying that, Ottawa is not a large city. We probably ended up walking for about 2 hours and, as it was getting quite cool, we headed back to the apartment to plan our next day's activities.