July 1st – Canada Day

July 1st and it is Canada Day
The festivities and ceremonies are schedule to start at 9:00 a.m. So we headed over to Parliament Hill around 8:30 a.m………. bad decision and a little late. Lined up outside were about 50,000 people so, we stood in one of the many line-ups at the various gates and waited for the gates to open at 9:00. We forgot to mention that they were performing body scan and bag searches and security measures.
Well on schedule the gates opened and the Pageantry started on time, so we got to see the Bands and Pipers and Guards go by to begin the ceremonies. Now a key learning and a note for the future. The changing of the guard etc occurs on the east side of the lawn and that delays the people getting allowed into this area. In the future we would line up down near the gates into the west lawn area.
We finally made it inside and somewhere along the way we got a few pictures and saw the Snow Birds, sang O Canada. After about 1 1/2 hrs or so we left the Parliament Hill area and headed over to Major Hill Park for the other Canada Day festivities. Well, in our opinion Kamloops has as good, if not better vendor displays, food concessions, etc as they have in Ottawa.
This is when we learned another tip for Canada Day in Ottawa. We thought we would head back over to Parliament Hill to get back into the lawn area to watch the entertainment……. Wrong. They closed the gates when they estimate that there are about 50,000 on site. So there we are with probably now about 80,000 people standing in lines trying to get in and going nowhere.
However, the real surprising thing is that by about 2:00 p.m. they wrap up the entertainment until later in the evening when they repeat the show they did in the morning. Once again we believe the variety and scope of entertainment that we have in Kamloops easily beats what they had going on in Ottawa.

The evening finished with a great fireworks display, which they thought was going to be canceled as there was a lightning storm headed towards the City, but it fizzed out and the show went on!