Seeing as it is my first winter in Ottawa I did what had to be done...went skating on the Rideau canal. It was my first time skating in maybe three years. The first 30 seconds were a bit unsteady but it is like riding a bike, it comes back really quickly. I went skating twice this past weekend, Friday night and Saturday afternoon. The canal is currently fully open but may not stay that way for long if the weather forecast holds true. The ice was in decent shape, the later it got the more beat up it was but I guess that is par for the course. You had to watch out for a couple fairly large gashes in the ice.

Friday night was pretty cold out so I dressed in a bunch of layers...a bit too much as it turned out. Considering it was about -15 I was really hot. The ski mitts were too much, I had to switch back to my normal gloves and even those were too warm. Once you get moving and get the blood flowing it feels really hot out there. The only part of me that got cold where my ears, I guess I need a more windproof hat. One thing I did not expect was the lack of light. I just assumed that there would be some lights along the canal, I assumed wrong. It can be really dark in places which means you have to really watch out for chips in the ice. All in all it was a good time.

Saturday my cousin came down from Montreal with a couple of friends and we headed out to the canal for some daytime skating. It was a really nice day, warm (-7 or so) and sunny. The one down side to this was that there were a ton of people out but it was alright. For the most part people on the canal are pretty good at watching out where they are going. I only had one kid turn into me and managed to avoid hitting them.

In total I think I did around 12km on the ice between the two outings. Next weekend I may go and try skating the canal from end to end. There is about 7km that is skateable. We shall see how the weather is and if I feel up to it.

The other thing we did Saturday was go by a number of the ice sculptures. Wow are they impressive. We got to watch a couple of people working on their sculptures where was also really neat. I hope they are still around next weekend as I forgot to bring my camera the first time.