On River Road

Finding ourselves in Manotick today—a friend drove me there on a whim—we had lunch at the Black Dog on the High Street, spent a while admiring the premises of the Mill Street Florist, and returned home along River Road which eventually runs into Riverside Drive. Within the city proper, River Road reappears, calling itself River Road North as it follows the east bank through Overbrook and Vanier, with attractive houses and parks all the way along.

The small town of Manotick, a reporting point for air traffic on the VFR approach to Ottawa International Airport, is built on and around an island in the River Rideau. In fact, Manotick's name is an Ojibwe word meaning "island in the river" and the first nineteenth century settlement there was based on the island around a mill that's still occasionally operational, Watson's Mill. We passed the mill today, driving onto the island across the bridge that offers a view of the tumbling weir beside it.

On one side of the river runs Rideau Valley Drive and, on the other side, River Road, both routes allowing for a pleasant ride to and from the city. Near Manotick there's a row of "monster houses" (as people call them) along River Road, American style riverside properties for the very rich! As you drive north you approach the city of Ottawa through the residential suburbs of Riverside South and the romantically named Heart's Desire (near the Jock River where it flows into the Rideau). I know an old lady who has just moved out of her house on the banks of the Jock into a retirement home and must miss her view of the water terribly at the moment.  We had another elderly, widowed lady in the car with us who lives on the 17th floor of an appartment block overlooking the Rideau within the city, and she said she wouldn't have stayed in the city if she hadn't had the consolation of that view. My river, she called it, as we came to the end of our drive—"We have followed my river all the way down."