Tuesday 10 May: The first trip to Gatineau Park in Quebec, about 20 minutes drive out of Ottawa. According to their website it’s 363 square kilometres of parkland which means you can easily spend a week here, exploring all of the lookouts, the trails, cycle paths, lakes. Culiminating in a visit to the Mackenzie King Estate, the summer residence of Canada’s 10th prime minister, which occupies 231 hectares. This is open later in May.

First stop for today was right at the top of the Park – the Champlain Lookout which overlooks the Ottawa River, St. Lawrence Lowlands, Eardley Escarpment and Canadian Shield. The Canadian Shield accounts for almost half the total area of Canada, i.e. 4.5 million square kilometres.

Our next stop was to be the Waterfall Trail, but we ended up going through the Moorfield Trail. This was a nice surprise as we eventually found ourselves at Moorfield Cottage. Mackenzie King moved here during his third term as prime minister. Again it was closed at the time, but I got some nice photos of the cottage and the ruins that he had constructed from remains of Ottawa’s Bank of British North America.

Turning back, we then found the right route to the Waterfall Trail. This is probably more spectacular during spring-time, but I wouldn’t like to walk it as it could be too slippery or icy. What do you find at the end? A waterfall, of course.

The Pink Lake is another must-see part of Gatineau Park. Except only half of it is open. The far side is closed due to rock falls and it could be some time before the area is secured and safe to allow visitors once again around the entire lake. If you want to, you can get further round simply by sidestepping the 20ft wide fencing. We didn’t.

The lake is 20 metres deep which is deep for a lake of this size (it would take around 1 hour to walk all the way around). It also lacks any oxygen below 13 metres as there are two layers of water which never mix. This is a meromictic lake. The separation of the layers of water are caused by the shelter of the surrounding cliffs and the millions of suspended particles which makes the water at the bottom heavier than that at the surface.

Tip for tourists: If you’ve visiting places with plaques and noticeboards, grab photos of them so you can read ‘em when you get back, blog about them and keep a record of what photos match with which locations.

For the record it was 82° when we visited Gatineau Park. But this area of Canada has funny weather until the jet stream gets stabilised.