Oh, Canada.
What a country. We just spent two weeks with our friends to the north, as you may know it's a foreign country but we were a bit surprised at how well they spoke English. So far I've fulfilled my commitment to not fill up for diesel once on the trip, as it costs around $9 per liter, I'll have to ask our second grader but I'm pretty sure there are 14 liters in a gallon. And if you're curious, our tank is 85 gallons and we get around 10 MPG, which means we can drive 800 miles without pulling over. Overall, we had a good time but are looking forward to Maine, which we've always considered our starting point. Toronto was our first stop, it's considered the "corporate" city, where Montreal is all about history, architecture, and art. If you like cities like we do, it's a great city's city. 60% of its inhabitants are not from Toronto, it's extremely diverse in language, color, cuisine and architecture. When we arrived, we headed straight for China town, ate in a Japanese restaurant, and enjoyed a bowl of Vietnamese noodles. We took a double decker bus tour and probably learned more than the locals. The trip was 2 hours long, which is pretty long for a 4 year old, luckily he fell aside on my lap. It was pretty cold up top, but fortunately Campbell pee'd all over my lap, although warm for the moment, walking around the rest of the day wasn't very comfortable. Good times....
We also spent a evening with a the Wilson's, a high school friend. We played in a back yard, and sat at a really big table for dinner.... I think they called it a "dining room". Those crazy house-dwellers.
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Campbell discovered a new species, he calls it the "Camping Eagle", pretty clever I think.
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Niagara Falls is amazing, we took the Maid of the Mist boat which gets up close and personal with the falls. We had to stay on the Canadian side because we forgot our passports, pretty funny looking at the US across the water knowing you can't enter.
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Bonjour! Montreal is also an extraordinary city, if you were taking a class on European history and opened the text book, you'd see this city today. The pride of the city is its historical buildings, and great restaurants. Most building were built in the 17 and 1800's. Not the perfect place for kids but we did our best. And if you don't know French, learn some before visiting, all menus signs and people speak French first.
We spent most of our time in Old Montreal, which is old.
Me and the kids went downtown to bike the city trails, it took us 2 hours to get across the bridge (3 miles) because of traffic, we finally found parking and starting our adventure. See video. It turns out this day is known as "Free Day", which means all attractions are free, and holy crap do Canadians like free! We biked for an hour, and it was crazy, half the time I couldn't see the kids.
Listen to Cam say he can't go through there, and I tell him to just go, he blazed a trail... I left the end of the video when Campbell ran into a guy and I dropped the video camera to help.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUD5xoCGOyc&fs=1&hl=en_US]
We took a carriage ridge through the entire crowded city, Mel the Islamic Moroccan bilingual driver, let the kids drive and sit up in the seat the entire ride... very cool and the kids loved it. BTW - I know he's Islamic because we talked about their culture most of trip, very interesting. Did you know that women in the family are considered number one, ahead of men. The men in the family are required to take care of them financially, and if they don't, they can be arrested. Mel knows this first hand, because upon returning to Morocco a few years ago he was arrested at the border because he didn't send enough money home... I told him we make our women work!
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