catching up (Happy belated Canada Day!)

July 1 (Canada Day): Today was crazy. Crazy.
First Dad and Steph decided it would be fun to see Will and Kate so we globbed on the sunscreen and trekked over to the bus stop where we waited for a few minutes, Dad studying a map as Steph and I played “bus stop”, a funny game I play with my drama friends at school (whoever makes the other person feel awkward enough to run away wins). When the Canadian flag emblazoned bus lurched to a stop before us we were greeted by a smiling Canadian fellow (the driver) sporting a tall white and red beer hat.
“How much is it for three?” Dad asked, “Nine dollars?”
“Oh no, you guys can have the family day pass.”
My dad later told us that he’d given us a fantastic deal, because normally the $7 pass was for people with kids 12 and under.
Debarking the bus we joined the flowing mass of red and white-garbed Canadians and tourists until we reached a street show where we stopped long enough to clap and holler gregariously for a plastic chicken; It was all part of the performer’s act— he disguised himself as just another person in the crowd (plucked a baseball cap off a little yellow-ponytailed girl’s head, popped it on his own) and whooed and whistled with the rest of us, apparently for a plastic chicken sitting on a bicycle. After a couple minutes of this, he jumped back into the center of the circle and called, “If you’re one of the confused people who just walked up…sucker!”

When Marie (one of my best friend’s super cool Canadian aunt) joined us, we walked up to Parliament Hill which was HOT. There was a concert going on up there on a humongous stage erected just for the occasion, but really most people were just waiting for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to appear. And eventually… they did! We sort of saw them (I think I might have seen some of Kate’s red hat; and Steph and Dad claim to have seen both of them from “just a hundred feet away!”) and had a nice view of the bobbing heads of the Canadian Mounted Police galloping along the periphery of the crowd. Then came the jets. Oh dear. Every time they zoomed overhead a maybe-three-year-old kid would burst into horrified tears. Poor kid. They were loud. But we couldn’t help chuckling as his dad who was holding him patted him on the back every time, rolling his eyes as we offered him sympathetic smiles.

Later we sat under a tree by a lovely beach by Marie’s house (she knows all the good spots; after we watched Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s new (fantastic) movie (Steph wanted to see it because it had her favorite actress Rachel McAdams in it and she was great but she played an extremely annoying character, so we bothered Steph about that, pretending the character and the person were the same), Marie drove us to a gorgeous water-overlooking view of Ottawa. It was that awingly peaceful, warm golden-light time between late afternoon and evening). We ate salad, sandwiches, and cookies as Steph entertained Marie with tragic tales of the woes high school as Dad and I shook our heads and lazed in the shade.
When the sky darkened to a velvety black, we watched the fireworks with Will and Kate (…metaphorically?) and walked back to the boat at Dow’s Lake with a couple of friendly Canadians as our guides.