We had the whole day to kill.
Ok, we got our start around noon, and the sun goes down early in Ottawa in winter. So we didn’t really have the whole day, more like several hours.
So… we had several hours to kill. We planned to spend the time skating on the Rideau Canal, on the world’s longest skating rink.
“Only two hours?” Trudy asked. “Should we rent the skates for four hours, instead?”
“I think that’ll be plenty,” I said.
Skates on, we inched our way along the canal from distance marker to distance marker. As Canadians came whizzing by, we plodded our way like a couple of … Texans on ice skates.
Trudy hung on to my arm. I pulled us along so that we might make it to Fifth Street for beaver tails, hot drinks and a place to sit next to a fire. But our going was slow, and our feet got sore quickly. We stopped for frequent breaks.
“I’ll rest here,” Trudy would say, leaning against the wall of the canal. “You go skate by yourself for a while.”
So I would skate up the canal, always just at the edge of spectacular catastrophe (and once arriving there). And then I’d skate back to where Trudy was still leaning against the wall in her green coat and blue hat with a smile on her face. And then we’d continue upstream.
It went on this way for what seemed a long distance, but after an hour we turned around and could easily see the bridge where we had rented our skates. In that hour, we had not come very far. We certainly didn’t make it to Fifth Street. And now it was time to head back.
So we turned around and headed back. Skate. Rest. Skate. Rest.
When we finally returned to the bridge, it seemed as if we had been at it for a very long time. Our feet were sore. Our shirts were wet with sweat. And it was starting to get cold, because the sun was going down.
We stood in line to return our skates. We put our boots back on. And we walked across the frozen canal to the stairs leading up to Confederation Park.
Trudy turned to me and said, “I feel so stable, now!”
We had the whole day to kill. We spent just over two hours on the ice. And with that, our day was pretty much done.