Kingston was fun!
That's how we'd both put it, anyway.
We left Ottawa with our rental car at about 10:30 in the morning and made pretty good time, parking in Kingston near the arena around 12:40. The drive was uneventful: the highways were fairly quick and clear of traffic and there was no snow to be seen. The Corolla we rented didn't really have to work all that hard.
Reasons to Get Out of Town
Admittedly, the need for a day trip was probably more for me than it was for Kathleen. While we both get a little bit of geographic cabin fever at this time of year, I think it tends to be worse for me.
Kathleen's bigger motivation was to become more comfortable navigating!
Whenever we rent or borrow a car to visit a place that's not easily accessible by train or plane, it's my job to navigate. I enjoy it, and one of the ways my neurodivergent ways has always expressed itself was through road maps.
Whenever we'd get a new Ontario road map growing up, it would be up on my wall within minutes and I would study it intensely, memorizing highways and towns and their populations (or at least relative sizes, per the Province's analysts) and imagine visiting some day. While I don't really do this today, on any given quiet day, you can probably find me street viewing around some city or town.
It's part of why we like to joke that even when I don't know where I'm going, I know where I'm going!
There will be times where I cannot be with Kathleen in these situations and she will have to navigate on her own, however, so one reason for the rental and travel was that on matters of navigation, I would keep quiet and Kathleen would use the turn-by-turn navigation.
Assisted by Apple Maps (whose direction-giving Kathleen found much more helpful than Google's), Kathleen navigated us to and from Kingston without any issue whatsoever! Not one "recalculating route", not one "oops, we have to turn back".
Flawless navigation!
Stone City Fun
For my part, thanks in no small part to that time spent studying maps, and thanks to our family road trips to Southern Ontario, I unfailingly get a good feel when we are somewhere that feels to me link southern Ontario, and although we were firmly in Eastern Ontario (which normally feels like Northern Ontario, where I'm from), there is something about the province's design language along the 401 corridor and the geography along the St. Lawrence that will always perk me up.
We arrived in Kingtson quite ready for lunch and having searched for restaurants with vegan options, it didn't take us too long to find Atomica, whose lunch menu promised us two very tasty-sounding vegan pizzas, which we ordered once we were settled into a nice booth.
Now, they were absolutely delicious, with the mushroom one being slightly preferred by the both of us. We just would have preferred that it had not taken more than an hour to get them to us without any particular explanation. From where I was sitting, there appears to have been some kind of mix-up with our orders, but it wasn't really communicated to us.
After lunch, as we had planned to do, we proceeded to make our way up and down Princess Street, stopping in a various shops.
The highlights were found in the book shop, where I found another one of Emily Austen's novels, and the various vintage shops, which reminded me of the great shops we visited while in Halifax in September.
Unfortunately, winter dressing has consistently proven a barrier to shopping for clothes, since it's an entire production to get bundled back up, with an order of operations and everything!
(Coat, boots, purse, camera [if], backpack [if], scarf, hat, mittens.)
Finishing our little wander up Princess to Division and back again, we stopped into a a coffee shop for a little warm beverage and headed back to the car.
Once more, Kathleen's navigation was flawless, and made it back to Ottawa in good time, promising that we'd do this sort of thing more often.
Perhaps when the weather is better!
February 15, 2026