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Boats on the Rideau Locks

Sun, 8 Aug 2010, 04:13 AM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

There are locks at the end of the Rideau Canal: a series of eight gates the step the water down from the level of Parliament Hill to the Ottawa River.

A photo of the Ottawa River locks on the Rideau Canal.

And if you’ve got a boat, they’ll crank open the gates for you, and you can go down in the morning and climb back up in the afternoon.

A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.

A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.

But here’s the thing of it. It takes two hours to traverse those eight locks: two hours each way.

A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.  A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.  A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River. 

A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.  A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.  A photo of boats coming up the Rideau Canal locks from the Ottawa River.

That’s four hours getting there and back, and that doesn’t even include time on the river. So you really need to have time on your hands for this.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License