Back to Ottawa via the Danish Pastry House

Having woken up before me, Mrs Ottawacker and Ottawacker Jr went in for a final visit to see Vagn, while I showered and got various things ready for the trip back up to Ottawa. We’d made pretty good time on the way down and I was hopeful it would be the same on the way back. That, of course, was before taking the Ottawacker curveballs into account.
 
“There’s a Danish pastry shop in Toronto I want to go to,” said Mrs Ottawacker brightly upon her return. The Danes are rather keen on their pastries, and believe nobody can match the lightness of touch with which “de danske kondtitore” can manipulate the Wienerbrød.
“But we have Danish pastry shops in Ottawa,” I said.
“Yes, but this is a Danish Danish pastry shop,” she said, as if that changed anything or settled the argument.
“But,” I started. Then decided better of it.
“And don’t forget you promised me we could go to the airport in London,” said Ottawacker Jr, not to be outdone.
“But you went to the airport in Sarnia yesterday,” said I (as if that changed anything or settled the argument).
“Yes, but London is different,” he said. “Then I’ll have been to two London airports.”
 
Realizing that out trip home had now probably gone from an 8-hour jaunt to a 10-hour slog, I shrugged my shoulders, smiled the smile of the vanquished, and loaded the car. Later on, I was to yearn for the 10-hour slog.
 
We hit the rainstorm just outside London. It made any speed above 70 km/h impossible, unless you were a truck. Trucks or rather their drivers, I soon understood, see rainstorms as an opportunity to vent spleen on other road users and gain revenge for being limited to a modest 105 km/h at all other times. On top of this, it gives them a great opportunity to use the fast lane – almost exclusively – and to engage in their favourite sport of travelling three abreast down highways while chatting giddily on their cell phones or whatever else they have replaced their CB radios with. It was a relief to pull off the 402 and into the relative sanity of London.
 
Having sated Ottawacker Jr’s aviation lust, we got back on the highway and, just as the rain abated, we hit roadworks. Onto the 401: slowly. There, the rain started again. All the way into Toronto, we moved at a snail’s pace – or not at all. There were brief, mad interludes during which we reached the giddy heights of 60km/h, but these only served to bring into sharper relief the lumbering, plodding, stultifying, cloying speed at which we normally travelled. I almost, almost said “we should never have come via Toronto,” but 20-plus years of marriage, as well as a desire for another 20-plus years of marriage, led me to another decision. In the end, the inevitable dawned on Mrs Ottawacker.
 
“The Danish pastry shop is going to be closed,” she said. Aghast.
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe.”
 
Having relinquished the wheel an hour previously, I was in no position no counter what happened next. Michele Mouton would have been proud of the speed at which Mrs Ottawacker weaved in and out of traffic, sped along the hard shoulder to cut in front of a truck, leaving a concerto of horns in her wake. Leaving feeder lanes to speed into Express lanes, then back again to squeal off the highway, and into the streets surrounding the Fairview Mall on Sheppard, home of the Danish Pastry House.
 
Pausing only to help to her feet the geriatric nun into whom she had barrelled, Mrs Ottawacker sprinted through the car park, dived headlong into the mall, and disappeared from view. There was a sudden silence in the car, broken, some 30 seconds later, by Ottawacker Jr.
 
“Wow,” he said. “I guess she really wanted that pastry. Never get in the way of a Dane on her way to the pastry store.” Aged 11, he is already master of the understated aphorism.
 
We sat and waited, more in fear than in anticipation, praying that the shop would not have closed. Or worse, that it would be open, but not have the type of pastry Mrs Ottawacker wanted. I’m not sure I could have explained to Toronto Police or the Fairview Mall Security just why an early  middle-aged woman had run amok in the Danish Pastry House. I toyed with the conversation in my head (“they had no Wienerbrød, you see, officer”), but quickly abandoned the idea: the only possible way out of any situation would be to claim I didn’t know her.
 
Fortunately for the staff of the Danish Pastry House and for Ottawacker Jr and me, she emerged triumphantly from the Fairview Mall, holding a red box aloft in much the way Virgil van Dijk raised the Carabao Cup.

“They were open,” she said, to the car in general.
“I got you something,” she said to Ottawacker Jr.
“But not you,” she said to me. “Nuts.” 

By this, she meant that there were nuts everywhere in the store and it would have been too risky for one allergic to them to eat anything sold by the said store. At least, I think that is how she used it, she may be more of a mind reader than I give her credit for and have been well aware of my feelings about adding three hours onto an 8-hour car journey … for a piece of cake. Ignoring the suspicious white layer of icing sugar already coating her top lip, I pulled out of the mall car park, listening to the contented chomping from the passenger seat and behind me, and made my way back to the 401.
 
It had stopped raining. 

The blip was taken in a superb Lebanese cafe in Kingston (M&J's); all traces of sugar had been removed for this photo.