Given all of the travelling that we've done in the past ten days...Steve and I decided that we were going to spend this weekend just being lazy and housebound. We only ventured out of the neighborhood by car once and let me just say, for the record, that it was one time too many!!!!

The only thing that we really wanted to get done this weekend was to take in one last weekend of picking strawberries and we needed to visit the site of the new house. All of this was to be fairly harmless and if all went well, would be accomplished in under an hour. Well, we hopped on the Queensway Westbound to the farm and apparently, there is a new bridge being replaced at Island Park and the 417 was reduced to two lanes. Though the traffic jam didn't take too long to get through, we did notice that the traffic going eastbound was backed up for quite a ways.

After twenty minutes of getting our 4 litres of strawberries, we headed to the East end to see our new pile of dirt!! Being the clever people that we are, we decided to avoid the 417 until we passed the Island Park exit and would jump on after that. Unfortunately, the construction fairies had other plans in mind for us!!!! As is turns out, Carling was reduced to one lane of traffic due to construction and then once you got all the way through that crap... the on ramp to the 417 was closed due to construction in the other direction ...UNBELIEVABLE!!! After losing our cool more than once, we did an illegal turn and decided to try our luck going down to the Parkway and taking the scenic route to the East end. Much to our own astonishment, that too was closed due to Bluesfest!!! From the looks of it, we had entered some sort of abyss in which a line was drawn right down the centre of the city and any chances you made have had to cross back over could be kissed goodbye!! It was infuriating!!!

Our trip across Ottawa that should have taken us a mere six or seven minutes via the Queensway took us over forty minutes from end to end. A real pat on the back to all of those urban planners that decided to shut down the city in the middle of Bluesfest and the FIFA U-20 tournament because, you know, who would need to get around at a time like that?!?!

Anyways, to make a long story short...we ended up spending the rest of our weekend writing a strongly worded letter to the city of Ottawa suggesting that, in the future, when they post road closure signs, they should read a little something like this:

ROAD CLOSURES UP AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE ANY ANTI-DEPRESSANTS IN YOUR VEHICLE AT THIS TIME...PLEASE START TAKING THEM NOW!