Monday’s the New Sunday

I think Ryan has mentioned lately that we spend Mondays together as family day. It is the only day off that he has a week. So we have decided that each Monday we are going to go to some really cool place in the Ottawa region, explore and have some great family memories up here in Canada. It’s been awesome so far. We have been to Gatineau Park, Museum of Civilization, Mer Bleue Bog and this week we travelled over to Quebec to go to Parc Omega.

The drive was great. We took a ferry across the Ottawa River a little bit east of where we are at here in Orleans and landed just on the other side in French Quebec. We drove about 45 minutes through rural farms and little pockets of cities until we got to Montebello, where this amazing park was just north of.

Parc Omega – it’s a drive thru wildlife experience and it is massive. You drive your car through the park, and Red Deer, Fallow Deer (my favorites), Wapiti aka Elk, hogs and boars would come up to your car, stick their slobbery, wet and buggy mugs in your window and demand a carrot or two.

It was awesome. The kids fed them. Ruth would yell from the car, as if these animals could hear her, and say “Hey Hog!! I’m going to feed you a carrot.” Johnny shied away from it a little bit but did feed some. And poor Ryan, I heard him say, “I feel like a kid in a candy store and I can’t have anything. I can’t believe I am feeding these things instead of shooting them.” (I think that was mostly directed to the huge boars)

There were amazing animals that we saw beyond those who walk up to your car to be fed – Bison, Arctic Wolves, Black Bears. Obviously, you were not allowed to feed those.

We had this one amazing experience that made the drive and the money we spent to get in totally worth it. We went down by this lake where we could feed some fish in a pond. And then all of a sudden a huge pack of beautiful Fallow Deer gather around some food the park ranger just dropped for them, and surrounded us. It was surreal. No one else was there but us. They ate all around us. Ruth was in heaven. They let her feed them, touch them, hug them a bit. If she could, she would have gotten on one of their backs and ridden off into the mountains.

I was able to get some good pictures out there. I’ve put a few in here but check out our Flickr page for more.

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