An unexpected trip to the Canadian capital led to some of my favorite travel memories.

Several years ago, my husband and I set off on a two-week trip to Toronto and Montreal. I’m usually a compulsive travel planner, except when it comes to Ontario. It’s only a six-hour drive from Chicago to the Canadian border and we’ve made the trip more than a dozen times. It feels like we’re visiting an old friend, and we enjoy having the flexibility to drift wherever the spirit takes us.

Changing of the Guard, Canadian Parliament

We crossed the border at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Michigan, then stopped in Sarnia, Ontario, for the night. After checking into a hotel, we headed to one of the chip trucks under the bridge to enjoy the first poutine of our trip.

The next morning, we stopped at the Ontario Travel Information Center to buy Toronto CityPasses make some hotel reservations for Toronto. We were dismayed to discover there were two major music festivals in Toronto over the upcoming weekend, and every hotel room in the city and nearby suburbs was booked.

We decided to flip the trip and head to Montreal first, but there weren’t any hotel rooms in Montreal either. It turns out that the first Monday in August is a holiday across much of Canada, but it’s known by a different name in almost every province, which is probably why it didn’t show up on our radar. No matter what it’s called, we were suddenly faced with the equivalent of trying to book a last-minute getaway on Labor Day weekend in the U.S.

After considering some other options, we decided to scrap Montreal altogether and head to Ottawa, the Canadian capital. We’d never been there, but after some hasty online research, I put together a plan for a three-day stay and we booked a room at a hotel within walking distance of some of the city’s most popular sights.

Our First Day in Ottawa

We arrived in Ottawa just after noon and checked into our hotel. The weather was beautiful, and we had a lovely afternoon exploring the city. That evening, we headed to Parliament Hill to enjoy Northern Lights, a beautiful, expressive multimedia show highlighting the history of Canada.

Our Second Day

The next morning, we trekked across town to the Royal Canadian Mint. We explored the Mint shop while we waited for our tour to start, admiring an array of beautiful collectible coins ranging in price from moderately to wildly expensive. There’s no charge to admire the 28-pound gold bar on display in the shop. It’s chained to a stand and watched over by security, but visitors can pick it up and take pictures with it.

Today, Canada’s circulating coins are minted at a high-tech facility in Winnipeg. The Ottawa facility, which opened in 1908, produces collectible and investment coins, gold and silver bullion, and medals and medallions, including the medals for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Only a few areas were operating, but videos along the tour route showed what it looks like when everything’s in full swing, and our guide did a great job of explaining the various processes. Sadly, they don’t hand out free Loonies at the end of the tour!

We headed to the historic ByWard Market in search of lunch. The covered area of the market houses small shops and eateries, including a mouth-watering French patisserie, while the seasonal outdoor market brims with fresh, locally grown produce. There are also some great restaurants and pubs in the area. After lunch, we stopped by the Rideau Canal to watch a long line of pleasure craft enduring the agonizingly slow process of moving through the eight locks on this stretch of the canal.

Our last stop of the day was the Supreme Court, where I wanted to see the cornerstone laid by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1939. The grounds were deserted, and as I looked for the cornerstone, I startled a chubby brown animal that was rooting around in the grass. It scampered under a concrete planter but soon came out and started rooting around again.

We had no idea what it was, so I asked a police officer who was standing nearby. It turned out to be a groundhog, and apparently, we were lucky to catch sight of it because they rarely get that close to humans.

We ended up having a great conversation with the officer, who was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — yes, a real Mountie! He proudly showed us a photo of him and his wife, who’s also a Mountie, wearing their dress uniforms as part of the honor guard for the 2016 North American summit with U.S. President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Our Last Day in Ottawa

Day three was the most ambitious day of our visit. I wanted to tour Parliament, and the only way to do it at the time was to stand in line at the visitor’s center for same-day tickets. So, we headed over to the visitor’s center first thing in the morning, waited in line for almost two hours, and managed to snag tickets for one of the last tours of the day. Thank goodness tickets can now be reserved online.

While we were standing in line, we were delighted to catch part of Parliament’s Changing of the Guard ceremony, including the parade of Ceremonial Guard members marching down Wellington Street in their bright red tunics and bearskin hats. They were followed by the Ceremonial Guard band, which included a line of kilted bagpipers.

After securing our tour tickets, we headed over to the Rideau Canal and tramped down what seemed like a hundred steps to catch a water taxi across the river to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. We spent several hours at the museum, and I particularly enjoyed the Grand Hall, which is filled with soaring totem poles and watched over by a dome mural painted by First Nation artist Alex Janvier. As we waited on the landing for our water taxi, we admired the stellar view of the Parliamentary buildings sitting atop Parliament Hill on the opposite bank.

We arrived back just in time for our tour of Parliament’s Centre Block. Highlights included the House of Commons, the reading room, the Salon de la Francophonie, and the impressive Library of Parliament, which is watched over by a charming statue of a young Queen Victoria.

After a filling dinner at an Irish pub, we wandered down Sparks Street, a pedestrianized thoroughfare lined with shops, restaurants, and bars. The Ottawa International Buskerfest was in full swing, and we stopped to enjoy several of the performers as we headed back to our hotel.

Our unplanned, whirlwind trip to Canada’s capital city was a big success and I have many fond memories of those three unexpected days in Ottawa.

Have I piqued your interest in Canada’s capital city? Ottawa Tourism is your best source of information on everything the city has to offer. Parliament’s Centre Block is currently closed for major renovations, but the free Immersive Experience takes visitors on a virtual multimedia tour of the building, and tours of the Senate building, the West Block, and the East Block (summer only) are still running.