Ottawa Tulip Festival

We took a quick day trip Ottawa, Canada's capital city, last weekend. It was a rather eventful day and everyone was exhausted by the end, but we are glad that we got to go to the tulip festival (I love tulips!!!) and see the Parliament buildings. Its about a 4 1/2 hour drive if you take the scenic route, so we started pretty early in the morning. Unfortunately, Natalie occasionally gets carsick, and she threw up a few hours into the drive just after she had eaten her breakfast. We stopped at a nice little provincial park called Silver Lake so I could clean up Natalie and her carseat while the other kids played near the water. Please ignore Natalie's outfit in in all the pictures- it was all I had in the car as extra clothes for her. The pants were too hot for such a warm humid day, but it was better than nothing.

It was a bit of a walk to get to the tulips and everyone was tired and hungry pretty early on.

As you can see, Natalie was very grumpy before we sat down for a picnic lunch even though she had a few snacks along the way.

Here are all the kids with the tulips. There were tons of people there (thats what we get for going on a Saturday), so taking pictures was a little tricky.

We got Beaver Tails- a classic Canadian treat- which are a flat fried bread with a topping such as Nutella or cinnamon and sugar. This is probably the last time the kids will get these before we move back to the US.

Here is a great picture showing Natalie's feelings about most of this trip ;)

Leif was getting pretty grumpy too by the end- I think the heat and the crowds got to him.

While we were in Ottawa, we decided to stop by the Parliament buildings.

We had quite another little adventure as we were leaving Ottawa and a huge thunderstorm hit the area. Luckily, we had pulled off the freeway for Austin to grab something to eat at McDonald's, but as we were in the drive-through, strong winds and rain pelted the car and large objects such as signs and tree branches were flying through the air. We didn't get hit and eventually were able to move the car around the side of the building for some protection. We waited there until it eased up a bit and started driving, but when we needed to stop for gas and went to a town a couple hours away from our house, we found that all the stores were out of power, including all but one gas station which we eventually realized we had to go to if we wanted gas. We waited in line for about an hour and finally got the car filled up, but in the meantime had a few meltdowns and potty accidents, though for the most part everyone dealt with it pretty well. On our way out of town we saw broken powerlines and trees all over the place and found out later that a tornado had gone through the town. It was quite the experience and although all the kids said that it was their least favorite part of the trip, I bet they'll remember it the best.