Yesterday was a superb spring day.  Light breeze, full sun and warmth enveloping everything.  As good a day as any to drive over to the stained glass shop and pick up the lead strands required to complete the current window under construction.  So off we set, along the Western Parkway with its long vistas of lovely specimen trees, rolling flats, the Ottawa River stretching out beside us, and in the distance the outline of the Gatineau Hills.

When we reached Parliament Hill we were astonished to see how heavily crowded it was with tourists.  an area that always attracts tour buses filled with tourists, this surely was a greater number than we'd ever previously seen, swarming into the Royal Canadian Mint, around the Peace memorial, the National Gallery, the Hill itself.  Everything was colourful with moving crowds of people.

As we proceeded down Sussex and gained the Eastern Parkway, we could see flocks of geese and ducks in the Ottawa River, and at Westboro Beach people were disporting themselves there, as though it were summer, though none happened to be swimming, just soaking up the sun, bicycling.

Particularly colourful were the ornamental flowering crab trees, in spectacular pinks and snowy whites, enlivening an already-colourful scene.  It seemed as though virtually overnight, the trees had assumed their summer aspect, sparking from mere suggestions of emerging tiny green leaves, to full-flooded maturity, an astonishing transformation.