Gatineau Park

Chris's short change today, so we took a run up into Gatineau Park this morning to check out Meech Lake and Champlain lookout. Oddly, this is the first time we have been up there since last summer. Time has just flown by since we returned from Florida in May. Getting the house ready to sell was very time consuming and frankly, cycling or sightseeing in the park just were not huge priorities.

Anyway, today was a beautiful day and we decided to enjoy some scenery. The public beaches are still open at Meech Lake with lifeguards on duty. We had heard that Ottawa's beaches no longer have lifeguards effective yesterday. We also followed a walking trail around the base of Champlain lookout that offered some great vistas of the valley.

Wakefield was our next stop. We drove in along the Gatineau River instead of Hwy 5. It was beautiful along the river but a word of warning about the road. Major potholes! We just had to pay a visit to the local bakery. Frankly, it was very disappointing. There was not much for sale and what was did not look very appetizing. We settled on a couple of empinatas and a turnover for dessert. Not bad, but not great. We checked out McLaren's cemetery before leaving Wakefield and learned that former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson is buried there. The cemetery is located on a hilltop past the Old Mill on Mill Rd.

We took Hwy 5 back toward Gatineau and checked out an old covered bridge. We followed the signs for P16 in Gatineau Park and were absolutely astonished at the amount of highway construction being done for the north extension of Hwy 5. The last time we took Pine Rd into P16, it was a nice drive on a quiet country lane. This time we had to drive through two brand new tunnels running under the new Hwy 5 extension. The earth moving machines running around on top of the tunnel were even dwarfed by the size of these tunnels.