Vacation plans

We've been trying to plan a vacation for a while now, but we couldn't bring ourselves to decide on a destination. Also, Amanda was still waiting for her new McCurley passport to return from the State Department, so we weren't really in a rush to book anything in case there was a problem with that. Now, however, the McCurley passport has arrived, and we've finally decided on a destination. It's a perfect storm.

Our destination - can you guess where we're going?

We had been trying to decide between a few different destinations: Sweden, Spain, Iceland (again), Canada, and Scotland/England were all in the running. Especially with Amanda's brother's family moving to Germany soon, we thought we could go to Sweden and then use Europe's outstanding transportation network to travel down to visit them for a while, too. We kept checking fares as we were waiting for the passport, but, just like flying to Iowa in December, flying to Europe is really expensive. If you're going to sink that much money into a vacation, it should be a long trip, and we were only planning to be gone for 7-10 days due to our jobs (as well as our anemic paid vacation allowances - Go USA!). So, we decided Europe might not be the best bang for our buck.

Once we made that decision, we decided to check out Canada. I have been there twice - once when I was young and we just drove across the border for about 30 minutes, and the second time when I went to Quebec City for a linguistics conference. Neither time was a real vacation, so we thought it would be cool to spend actual vacation time in Canada and see what there is to do/see. Plus, we were able to get round-trip tickets and hotels for the whole time for about the same price as just the flight to Europe. Also, the short flights from Ohio to Quebec will let us use more vacation time on the ground, instead of spending a whole day traveling across the Atlantic.

So, in early autumn, we will be traveling to Montreal and Quebec City, both in the province of Quebec. We're spending a few days in Montreal, then taking the VIA train from there to Quebec, where we'll spend the rest of the vacation. Thanks to Expedia.com and their great multi-city, multi-hotel search tool, we were able to get flights into Montreal and out of Quebec and save some travel time. Also, the same search let us find hotels in each city for the exact dates without any extra searching. Seriously, I've used Kayak, Priceline, Orbitz and other searchers to do multi-city flights before, but none of them have the same integrated hotel search as Expedia. I really recommend it if you're looking to schedule multiple-destination vacations!

Why do we want to go to Montreal/Quebec? From what I've read (and experienced from my linguistics conference trip), it's like going to Europe but here in North America. Plus, I've always wanted to go to Montreal since we watched the cultural video about it in French I at UNI. If you want to see what it's like, here's a two minute video from the Montreal Tourism site:

Also, Montreal supposedly has the most restaurants per capita in North America, so we should be able to eat pretty well! Quebec (the province) is especially famous for one dish in particular: Poutine. Poutine is a dish made up of french fries, gravy and cheese curds:

There are many varieties of poutine, and I'm sure we'll try more than our share of them.

Those are our vacation plans. Now it's just a matter of counting down the days/weeks/months until we get to go... Luckily, we have a few weddings and other trips to make this summer to hold us over in the meantime. Also, if any of you have been to Montreal/Quebec, we'd love to hear any recommendations or suggestions for the trip!