Hello from Montreal

September 21, 2009

Hello everyone,

A lot has happened since we last talked. We were heading to Rhode Island to meet up with Emanuela and Fil. We had a chance to get together with them and they took us on a tour of Brown University where Emanuela is doing her PhD. She walked through their traditional Van Winkle gates with Emma Watson (Hermione) and Bruce Willis’daughter Scout!!! Apparently she sees Emma Watson quite often! Wow! I was hoping for a glance, but no such luck. We stayed the night in their place, then it was off to Boston where we checked out the MIT museum. Very cool! The museum holds stuff that is/was made by people going to MIT. There were jumping robots and a robot named Kismet that responds appropriately to human speech intonations! So crazy! They also had these crazy art sculptures that would move with gears. Crazy stuff. We also stopped by Quincy market and had some atlantic lobster, clam chowder and Trevor had oysters and clams. Very yummy. I also managed to get us a parking ticket because I was parked too far from the curb! At least there wasn’t any face to face cop action happening with us. Laura, I know you warned us about how crazy Boston was, but it wasn’t until I was super angry with Trevor that I remembered you telling us! Next stop was crossing the border back to Canada!!! We were welcomed back by a very unenthusiastic and uncaring border officer. That was nice. Trevor found a lovely campground at 5 am atlantic time (we lost an hour crossing into the maritimes) that we parked at for the night in New Brunswick (though unfortunately I slept through the arrival, the park and most of the departure from the campground). We then stopped into Saint John where we had some breakfast and I felt a bit of nostalgia from being there back in 2002 for nationals. Then it was off to Nova Scotia to meet up with Moriah and Jared. Their place is AMAZING! They have a river in their backyard! Just insane. This is the kind of place I want to live in. Very cute house (small) with a netted back porch that looks out into the small yard and river flowing by. That river meets with the ocean only a few hundred meters away. You can walk about 2 min and swim in the ocean!!! Unbelievable! We celebrated Moriah’s birthday and went to bed for the night and the next day headed over to Peggy’s cove, a cute tiny village with randomly placed and randomly colored houses. Trevor and Jared jumped around on the huge boulders and Moriah and I took pictures of them and the lighthouse. We headed then into Halifax and walked the boardwalk (apparently the longest in somewhere…Canada maybe?) We stopped into a restaurant there to have oysters (well, Trevor had oysters and mussels, I had the chowder and the crab dip). You got to take advantage of the seafood while on the coast. That night we drove all the way to Charlottetown PEI! It was a cute small town and for some reason all the hotels were completely booked up but we managed to find a deal on Orbitz for this one hotel (that when asked inside told us all they had was suites that would cost $150). Turns out they were all booked, so through the deal on Orbitz we ended up getting a suite!! Very cool! It was a two story hotel room, very spacious with a microwave. The next day we went to their international shellfish festival where we indulged in mussels, Trevor had a ridiculous amount of oysters (some of them for free!) and clams and we both got to eat award winning chowder!!! They were having a competition and after the judges got served the chowder, everyone could go up and get a sample. We sampled 4 different kinds! We also got a free taste of a lobster dish that was being demo’d. We watched her cook it and then we ate it! How fabulous! And then we were off. Off to Quebec City. We made it 50km out from the city and parked in a rest area for the night. Today we walked the walled city and checked out all the cute little shops. It was like Europe (not that I’ve been, but I assume from the pictures I’ve seen). So very cute. We had crepes for breakfast and had poutine for lunch from chez ashton, apparently one of the restaurants claiming to have invented the poutine! We then drove to a chocolate museum (very small little chocolate store with a display) and then it was off to Montreal. We figured we wouldn’t do much in Montreal so we went to dinner and ate and were heading back to the hotel when a couple stopped us and offered us free tickets to the Canadien’s hockey game that had already started (because they had to leave early) so luckily our hotel is right outside the bell centre, so we went. We watched the Canadiens score 3 goals against Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh score 1 on the Canadiens. It was very exciting! (The score was 4 vs 3 for the Canadiens, but we missed the first two of Pittsburgh and the first one from the Canadiens). Now we’re hanging out in the hotel. Tomorrow we are heading to Ottawa!

HOPE EVERYONE IS DOING GREAT!

SMILEJ
The Travelling Prentices

Hello from Maine

This is an amazingly long email! I apologize for the length and hopefully you'll be able to get through it so that you can see all the crazy stuff we've done. Right now we are in a Welcome Centre in Maine heading to St.John New Brunswick. We'll see how far we make it tonight. Watch for the next email with details about the last day or so.

SMILE:)

September 12, 2009

We did a bunch of stuff in the last few days. Kennedy Space Centre was super cool. We did the NASA up close tour which brought us around to the launch sites and other areas of the Centre. Okay, they were from a distance, but still cool. We got to see a shuttle and touch a moon rock. Then it was off to the beaches of Miami. We got an awesome hotel using Hotwire. It was called Whitelaw and it was literally 30sec from the beach (not beachfront, but pretty close). The beach was awesome!!! It was a nice way to just hang out and do nothing. They were pretty empty too because it was a Tuesday. Unfortunately half way through the day it did cloud over, but it was still warm, so we hung out until around 5p and then headed back to get supper. We found out that our hotel was serving complimentary drinks from 7-8p so Trevor and I took advantage. It was great, until I realized that getting burnt at the beach and then getting drunk meant that my immune system had been down for too long and I was going to get sick (in retrospect, everything is so clear). After Miami we drove to Fort Lauderdale to see if I could meet up with one of the girls I worked with. Unfortunately she wasn’t there and I couldn’t get a hold of her L oh well, next stop. We drove as far as we could toward Washington DC. We passed through North Carolina (Kami, I did a little wave for you and Ron) and South Carolina (obviously not in that order) and then Virginia where we pulled off for the night. The next day around 5 p we finally made it to Chantilly, VG where we went to a sister Smithsonian. We saw some pretty cool air and space stuff including the concord that in Transformers is the old guy (okay I have no idea any Transformer names, but if you see the second one, you know who I’m talking about) and we saw the Enterprise shuttle and cool artifacts like their food and personal items. We also saw the Enola Gay which is the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Crazy stuff. Then around 7p we got into Washington DC and went searching on Hotwire to get a hotel. We got a Hilton, but once we got to the Hilton we realized that the Hilton is not all it’s cracked out to be. It means that parking costs $30 a day and you pay for every bloody thing including internet! It was such a scam. The room was also much smaller than our Best Western and Whitelaw AND no fridge or safety box (well you could ask for it, but the other hotels just had them in the room). At this point in the trip I was starting to feel crappy. The next day we were off to see the Smithsonian’s. We saw “the castle” where the loot pile from The Night at the Museum 2 was held and also one of the American Idol desks. And then we went to the Museum of Natural History full of stuffed animals. It sounds worse than it was. It was actually pretty cool. Ash, you would have been right at home at this place! They had a bones display from pilgrims in the 17^th and 18^th century and their analysis of the bones. It was cool. Then we went to the air and space museum but at that point I was definitely museum’d out! I was not pleasant company, but Trevor was awesome! We also went to see the Washington monument, the White House and the Lincoln Memorial. I don’t know how far we walked but it was insane! We got pizza that night and went back to the hotel. The next day was another round of museums and the zoo which has a panda!!! That was awesome!!! We tried doing that quick and then headed back to where the monuments and stuff were but some crazy rally and concert were going on and it was impossible to drive. We parked and ended up going to the Museum of American History which goes through how science spread and how the Americans travelled and there is one display on Pop Culture with one of 5 pairs of the original Ruby Slippers as well as a Kermit puppet and other things of that sort. We saw a CP30 from one of the movies and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle from one of the movies. Weird things like that. It was cool. But I was definitely done! We headed to our now new favorite place to eat (at least my favorite) Duccini’s grabbed a ridiculous amount of food and then headed out of Washington DC. We drove until we got to Jackson, New Jersey and parked by a lake for the night. The next day we were off to Six Flags! It was AWESOME!!! I LOVE ROLLERCOASTERS! Trevor didn’t feel too well for most of the day, but I went on most of the rollercoasters twice! It was awesome. By 5p we decided to head out and drive to New York. Once again, Hotwire put us in a Hilton. We used Hotwire outside a Crowne Plaza where we found internet. Finding internet has been interesting. There isn’t much unlocked wireless down here. Since we were going through New Jersey anyways, we decided to stop by Trevor’s old co-workers place. It was neat to see another person we knew on this crazy trip of ours. That night we got into our hotel by the Newark Airport (cheaper than New York) and slept until 10a. I just couldn’t get out of bed. We didn’t get out of the hotel room until 12p. At that point we headed to the Liberty State Park from the New Jersey side so that we could go see the Statue of Liberty. First we took a Ferry to Ellis Island, the main island of immigration. We went through the building where people would register to be immigrants in the USA. It was really neat. Then we took the ferry over to the Statue of Liberty where we actually got to go inside of the monument. We could only go up to the base of the statue on an oberservation deck that looked out to New York but it was still pretty cool. The view was great. Took some pictures then headed on the ferry back to our car. Thank goodness we went through the New Jersey side because there were probably 50X more people going on the ferry headed to New York than New Jersey. It was insane! Back at our car I figured we should head into New York but once we got there we were pretty much at a stand still. Traffic was awful. It was at that point Xenia, one of my old synchro kids, called and we told her we’d meet her. Never agree to something unless you know the full details. Apparently to get out to Long Island where she lives is 1.5hours from NewYork! But we drove out there and had supper with her which was really good. We were there quite late and then had a 1.5 hour drive back to the hotel, so once again we slept in until pretty late. This time we drove into Brooklyn and parked outside Trevor’s cousin’s place because she got back to us and said we could spend the night. It was the most interesting neighborhood. There were all these Jewish people with top hats and ringlets(the men) and the women wore black skirts and these cute hats or head wraps. It was crazy! I didn’t realize that New York had these kinds of neighborhoods. We took the metro into New York and headed to the World Trade Centre memorial site first, then it was off to Time Square where we saw the Mayor of London. Time Square was incredible! I can’t imagine seeing it all the time. This is where ADHD develops I think. So many flashing lights and adds, it’s crazy. Then we headed to Central Park before our Broadway was going to start. We went to see Wicked! It was AMAZING! That was definitely a great broadway musical to see and I highly recommend it to anyone going to New York. The singers were amazing and the set was incredible. It was so well done! After the show, we went through Time Square to our metro station. Time Square was showing Fashion week on the big screen! You should have seen all the people staring at the giant screen. It was very cool to be there. It was amazing how quiet it was even though there were so many people. Very neat. And then it was off to Manda’s for the night. We finally got in touch with her and got to talk to her briefly before she headed to bed. Her apartment was really neat. It was a very spacious high ceiling apartment with 2 bedrooms and an amazing view of New York! It was really awesome. Today, we are off to Providence to see Emanuela and Fil.

Hope everyone is doing great!

SMILEJ
The Travelling Prentices

Hello from Orlando

September 6,2009

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a while since I wrote so I’ll see if I can remember all that we’ve done. Okay, so we ended up catching up with Aurelie the next day over coffee then we began our intense drive from Indiana down to Georgia. We pretty much drove straight through. We stopped in Kentucky for Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then we stopped in Nashville, Tennessee to see the Country Music Hall of Fame. It doesn’t sound that exciting if you are not a country fan (which I’m not, but figured that since we’re in Nashville, you got to do it)but it actually was quite spectacular. It was kind of like a history of music at the beginning and had a bunch of cool outfits on display and a bunch of gold and platinum records. Very cool. Then it was off to Atlanta where we hotelled it that night. The next morning we went to check out the World of Coke. That was awesome! We got to try a bunch of Coke products (60 ish) from around the world. My favorite was one from Africa and it was a Bilbo drink-Kiwi Mango. There was a terrible one from Italy called Beverley. It was a ridiculously bitter drink. We also walked into the CNN building. It was pretty cool.

Then we were off to Orlando. We drove straight there from Atlanta and arrived at our ridiculously cheap Best western. The next morning we needed to buy tickets for Disney and lo and behold got sucked into going to a timeshare talk to get cheaper Disney tickets (I kinda wanted to go having heard from other people what they were like). They guy showed us some nice timeshares, but when it was time to say no, he was not interested. He wasn’t even making valid points by the end. In fact he told us that he didn’t want to sell to us anymore by the time we were through. We told him that if it truly was a good deal, he wouldn’t have to worry because we would be back to buy from him. Well, clearly it isn’t a good deal, because he said he wouldn’t sell to us. Oh well.

We grabbed our cheap tickets and off we went. We decided to do Typhoon Lagoon and Downtown Disney that night. It was a great hot day for the water park. We were tired at the end. So off we went back to the hotel to get rested for the next day.

The next day was Epcot in the morning until 2p and Magic Kingdom until 10p. It was a long day full of running back and forth between FastPass and regular rides. We made it though (barely). We actually ended up getting stuck on several rides(for short times. Who knew Disney rides could break down?) but the one that was craziest was Haunted Mansion. From what the ladies next to us were saying, we got stuck for 25min (where I took a nap and refreshed) and then they turned on the lights and walked us back out of the ride!!! It was cool to see the inner workings of the ride! We also had a bit of rain hit us. W e still rode rides but there were plenty of umbrellas and ponchos out.

Today we went to Animal Kingdom until 5p and Hollywood Studios until 10p with Fantasmic ending our DisneyWorld experience. It was a very hot and humid day. We got a little rain again today, but really it was more like mist. Again we ran everywhere and almost died from exhaustion, but we saw a bunch of stuff! It was a good time.

Tomorrow we are heading to the Kennedy Space station and then off to Miami!

Hope everyone is doing well!

SMILEJ
The Travelling Prentices

Hello from Lafayette, Indiana

September 1, 2009

Hello Again,

Well the highlight yesterday was the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota. Trevor did a lot of calling to get us into the museum and when the lady finally came she actually let us into the “shed” where the big ball is kept. Trevor had to buy a bunch of souvenirs as the song says and then we were off. It was a lot of driving. Unfortunately just before we got to the ball, we ended up being stopped for “speeding”which is ridiculous because Trevor was driving. Anyways, we got off with a warning. That would be #2 cop attention (border crossing being #1)

We made it to just outside Chicago last night with plenty of toll booths to greet us (as you said, Laura). We ended up parking in a bit of a residential area, kind of country like. Well, guess what woke us up? That’s right, the cops. We really need to stop running into these guys. That was #3. Anyways, they let us go, but it wasn’t a pleasant hello that’s for sure. We drove into Chicago and did an extremely long walking tour that the Lonely Planet suggested. Saw some pretty cool things including a mirror ball sculpture which was really cool. We listened to some live jazz and ate at the original deep dish pizza joint called Uno Pizzeria. We even took pictures at Harpo Studios. It was so exciting. It was just a wall (and a few body guards) between me and Oprah!

Next it was off to Purdue (Lafayette, IN)to visit Trevor’s friend Aurelie. We haven’t had any success connecting with her. We did get to take pictures next to a statue of Neil Armstrong. That was pretty cool. I guess he went to school here. We decided that we are going to stay overnight at a hotel. So we were driving from Aurelie’s house to get to the hotel, when there were flashing lights AGAIN behind us. Seriously! Fourth time in 5 states! You’d think we were criminals! I guess that’s what you get when you have foreign plates (and don’t have a front plate). Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day when it comes to cop stops.

I hope everyone is enjoying the beautiful Edmonton weather. Wish you were here!

SMILEJ
Amanda