Camping, with all the trimmings

Once we turned back towards home, we took some time for relaxing and stopped in a town that had caught our attention on the outbound trip, Deer Lodge, Montana. This was my morning view from bed, out the back window of The Rattler. Kind of made me want to stick around...

It's just a little bit of a town, but they've kept so much of their history, there's plenty to see and do.

You can visit the Old Montana Prison which has been converted into a museum.

The gift shop there is lots of fun, even for a non-shopper like me. Who knows, you might want to buy yourself a pair of the traditional striped prison garb. Despite their sad history, they look as though they'd make excellent pyjamas.

There's also an auto museum and a free-to-explore outdoor collection of classic rail cars.

But maybe my favourite attraction in town was the Olympic size swimming pool where I spent a vigorous half-hour (before they closed for the day) making up for some of the time I've spent sitting in the front seat of the RV as we sailed down the highways. And lucky me, aside from the lifeguard reading her book beside the pool, I was the only one there. Twelve feet deep and over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Might be reason enough to go back.

For now, I reckon I'm satisfied to get onto the road back home. 

City of contrasts

A five-day visit to Ottawa has convinced me the silly polls are wrong. Our capital doesn’t deserve its recent designation as Canada’s most boring city. Boring wasn’t a term I could apply. There was so much to do, I ran out of time and couldn’t get around to everything I’d wanted to see or do.

It’s a city where old meets new, most obviously in its architecture. Turn of the century (that is, the 19^th to 20^th) houses stand in small clumps beneath office towers. Churches and government buildings lend an air of tradition, while glass buildings and construction cranes crowd the horizon.

The National Gallery, where I spent two afternoons, provides further contrast, with antiquities under the same roof as starkly modern abstractions. The two items that fascinated me the most were a video loop shown on the ceiling (mattresses on the floor to lie on, so you can look up) and a tiny carving of a beluga whale, marked as being 2,500 years old. Wow!

As in any cosmopolitan city, there's plenty of high-end shopping and fancy restaurants. Unfortunately, the same contrasts evident elsewhere -- the ones between rich and poor -- are here as well. 

The market area provided more reasonable food choices -- bakeries, ethnic restaurants, poutine stands, flowers for sale. 

But the biggest contrast of all was the new exhibit on at Canada’s War Museum – an exhibit on Peace. 

One of the coolest aspects of this is the fact that John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to Ottawa on June 3, 1969. It was the day after they'd finished the bed-in events they'd done in Amsterdam and Montreal. By fluke, I ran into a photo of their meeting with Pierre Elliott Trudeau during that historic visit.

Now, if only I could convince the powers-that-be to change the name of the memorial museum to the Museum of War and Peace.