Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:02:57 +0000
Sunday in Milwaukee Index Ottawa
Early in the morning I checked my travel plans to make sure they made sense. Oops. My train from Toronto to Ottawa left precisely as my plane from Milwaukee was landing. Not only that, the train in the other direction arrived just as my plane for Tokyo is taking off. I can't believe how much I suck at this. So for the second time I cancelled and rebooked my train. And again, shout out to VIA rail for allowing that without penalty. I shudder to think what that would have costed if I'd booked it with Ryanair. The bad thing is that with the train leaving at 3:30PM, and taking four hours, I don't get any useful time in Ottawa today. The entire day is basically travelling.
But for once my flight wasn't stupidly early in the morning, so I even had time to join Andrew and Dingo for a walk in the morning. And of course, it's nice to be chauferred to the airport. So I was pretty relaxed at the airport. I even managed to dump every single coin in my wallet to buy some crackers with cheese, which makes me very happy. I've been dragging around that pile of nickels and dimes since 2004, and finally I've gotten rid of them.
The flight was uneventful, as was the transfer to the train station. I did get very confused at the train station because there are two different terminals close to each other, with two different departure boards. As a result, I was too late to get a window seat. Ah well, it's Toronto to Ottawa, what am I going to see?
There was a small scare as I hadn't specifically put together directions for how to get from the train station to the hostel. But a combination of a saved copy of the Wikitravel page for Ottawa and openstreetmap was enough to track the place down. The Nokia may be geeky, but it really does help.
The hostel is amazing. It's built in an old jail, and the rooms are the cells. They still have the huge heavy steel doors. Downside: wifi in bed is never going to be possible in this place. Maybe that's ultimately a good thing. On reflection, I'm pleased I managed to get where I'm going without incident. We'll have to see if I can turn that into some actual tourism tomorrow.