Ottawa is a beautiful city, easy to live in, to access parks and a green environment with its broad greenbelt.  Driving along the Eastern Parkway alongside the broad Ottawa River to arrive at downtown Ottawa reminds us of the peaceful and tranquil drive around Washington, D.C. although we are far more comfortably familiar with our own.  Washington has the distinction of being a site of many national monuments and public museums and art galleries.  Ottawa doesn't do too poorly in that department, as a much smaller nation with one-tenth the population of the United States.

Along Wellington Street, before the national monuments that are the Parliament Buildings and other government institutions, monuments honouring our war dead, the National Mint, National Gallery, and architectural focuses like the Chateau Laurier and the old Ottawa Railway Station, now a Conference Centre alongside newer ones with window curtain walls leaning over the Rideau Canal, there is much to look at and admire, including the Library and Archives and Supreme Court buildings, the new War Museum.

But at this time of year it is the presence of mature trees that overwhelm the senses, travelling from the Eastern to the Western Parkway, glimpsing the gushing waters of the Rideau Falls and the sites of old rapids reminding us of etchings contained in Picturesque Canada, where the river is dotted with Canada Geese resting on their flight south, and trees have turned orange, red and yellow, that enthrall the senses.