From the bed races, we decided to walk on the canal.
Skaters zoomed by, hands clasped behind their backs. Or they came by pulling toboggans loaded with boots and backpacks and sleepy kids. A few skated by slowly and tentatively, but the learners were few and the experts were many. Walkers such as us were virtually nowhere to be seen.
There were teenagers and school kids sprinting and horsing around. There were moms with babies and dads with sons chasing them. There were one-person sleighs (yes, sleighs). There were people from the neighborhoods sitting on drifts of snow putting on their skates.
And to our relief, there were places to eat out there on the ice. Places where you could get paninis and pizza and hot chocolate and beaver tails and maple taffy on ice. There was a place where you could taste of wine. And there were fire pits where you could warm your hands, although to Canadians this just-below-freezing day must have hardly qualified as cold.
We stayed to the far right, walking along a kind of ice/snow sidewalk against the edge of the canal. The kilometer markers called out the remaining distance to the Rideau Canal Locks: 7.2, 7.0, 5.4, 2.8, …
When we got to the 0.2 marker, the crowd was thick. There were people patiently standing in a neat line waiting to turn in their rental skates. And there were people crowding the stairs that led up from the canal to Confederation Park.
In the time we had left (for the sun was now going down, and it was beginning to get cold in earnest), we walked up to the park to see the ice sculptors at work. Whereas we had seen the two-hour competition the day before, this was the long-form event. There were 10 hours remaining on the countdown clock as they chiseled and cut and polished and shined their masterpieces.
We were done with the canal for the day, but tomorrow was supposed to be sunny, so we planned to return and to rent skates ourselves.