Right, Hogs Back. Know it well, my brother lives there. (For those not Ottawa-conversant, Hogs Back is a chute on the Rideau River a few miles south of downtown which was one of the reasons they had to build the Rideau Canal around it.)

Orleans, when I was young, was a sleepy crossroads with a hotel and a well-known butcher shop. Highway 17 was then the main route to Montreal... looking to the north you would see flat rectangular golden fields stretching to the Ottawa River, as they had for 150 years or so. Today there must be 20,000 identical houses on those fields.

And I ain't that old! (43) But the surroundings of the Blair Road interchange are to me the worst thing on the whole Queensway. Guess its cause I take it personally.

The Experimental Farm so far has avoided the developers clutches (picture this folks, 250 or is it 700 prime acres of active farmland and a wonderful park/aboretum, two miles from uptown of a major city) but considering how ready the NCC is to deal out chunks of Greenbelt, it's probably just a matter of time...

W-O