Hi everyone,
Since picking up our car on Friday we've managed to cover about 1,000 miles and spent 18 hours on the road buzzing around Canada's big cities and Niagara.
We picked up the car on Friday night and had planned to head north through New York state and find a motel on the US side of the border before heading across to Montreal the next morning. Unfortunately things didn't go quite to plan.
Just as we pulled off the motorway (sorry freeway) at about 11:30pm to find a motel in Plattsburgh, the last US town before the border, a torrential downpour came out of nowhere. No problem we thought, we'll just drive slowly and find a motel and get some sleep. Not so simple as it turned out. It was a Friday night and half of Canada had decided now would be a good time to visit their neighbours and all 4 of the motels we tried were full and it seemed we weren't likley to find anywhere before Canada.
We pressed on and crossed the border at 10 past midnight on Saturday morning. We drove another 10 miles and eventually found a couple of motels. The first was full but the second had one room left and it took us all of about a millisecond to agree to take it and get some rest.
Luckily the sun came back out on Saturday morning and we had a short drive into Montreal and parked up and found a great cafe for breakfast, serving up huge salmon and cream cheese bagels with free refills of coffee. Suitably refreshed, we strolled through downtown Montreal and towards the old town on the banks of the river.
Breakfast in Montreal
At this point, we should mention that Montreal is in Quebec, which is Canada's French-speaking region. Luckily for us though, our GCSE language skills weren't put to much of a test as everytime we tried to speak to someone in French, they immediately twigged we weren't native speakers / didn't have a clue what we were on about, and replied to us in English. Phew.
The Place Des Armes in Montreal
The city is really nice with a good mix of new buildings and skyscrapers with a lot of preserved old Victorian buildings. We wandered round the old town for a bit and had a cup of coffee and made the obligatory fridge magnet purchase (a furry mooses' head - awesome) before getting the metro to the botanical gardens. Where we spent about 20 minutes before another torrential downpour had us cowering in the rain for the next 20 minutes.
You know, I think it might be raining...
From Montreal, we drove to Montebello where we spent the night. According to Wikipedia: "The village is world famous for the Château Montebello resort, the largest log structure ever built. The resort was the host for the 1983 NATO Nuclear Planning Group, and the 1981 G7 Economic Summit." Wow! Those are some exciting stats aren't they! We did have a look at the Chateau and can confirm it was very nice. Didn't see any world leaders though.
On Sunday we continued westward to Ottawa, Canada's capital city. Apparently Ottawa was chosen as the capital for similar reasons to Canberra in Oz, in that it was a bit of a neutral choice half-way between two big rival cities (Montreal and Toronto in Canada's case). It's quite a small city and centred on the parliament building which looked rather similar to a certain parliament building in London...
Canada's (not Britain's) parliament building
We had lunch in the funky Byward Market and a brief stroll to parliament and down the Rideau Canal before getting back in the car and heading south into the USA again. We must have passed the fabled grilling of quickfire questions from the border guard ("Where ya from?", "How d'ya know each other?", "Where d'ya work?", "You're driving how far?!!" etc.) because she eventually let us pass after 5 minutes and we were back in New York State.
We made our way south and then took a right turn (i.e. west) after we'd passed the eastern shore of Lake Ontario and spent the night in Rochester, about 60 miles east of Niagara. In the morning we visited the Strong Museum which has over 500,000 pieces of assorted Americana but concentrated on toys dating from the 18th century up to the present day. We spent quite a while looking at the section on the 80's which had lots of toys that we'd had as kids. And Phil thrashed Sarah on the Atari racing game too. Get in.
From Rochester we drove along the southern shore of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. We managed to stumble upon a beautiful little town on the banks of the lake where we stopped for an ice cream and a fridge magnet and from where we could see the tops of some Toronto skyscrapers, including the famous CN Tower, which must have been at least 100 miles away across the water, before carrying on to Niagara.
To be honest we were kind of prepared to be underwhelmed by the falls because the guidebooks had said they were often built up to be better than they are in real-life ("the first disappointment of married life for all of those honeymooners" - the big cynics). We thought they were really impressive though - and there's a nice atmosphere about the place with lots of families and kids all excited to be there. Sure the falls themselves are not as vast as Iguazu but they still drop a long way down and the noise and force is huge. Superman certainly had a job on his hands resucing that small boy in the film!
Unlike Iguazu, Phil didn't have to take his pants of this time! Thank the lord.
We had a good look from the American side before crossing back into Canada (with a much briefer borderguard quiz). The view of the Falls is meant to be much better from the Canadian side because they face head onto to the Falls, so obviously the first thing we did was to...er...go to the cinema to see the new Batman film! We went back to the Falls after the film to see them lit up at night though and then went back for a proper day time look this morning.
Da na da na da na da na Batman...
Today (Tuesday) we drove to Toronto and have just had a brief look round so far. We're going to have more of an explore around shortly, before having dinner in the restaurant at the top of the enormous CN Tower tonight.
We've got some serious road action ahead of us after we leave Toronto though because it's the big drive around the north of the Great Lakes before dropping back down into America at the Michigan Peninsula and then onto Chicago.
Love Sarah and Phil x x
***IMPORTANT PHOTO NEWS!***
We've apparently managed to fill the 1500 capacity photo limit that World Nomads allows! So we've created a new journal page to hold all our USA and Canada pictures. So from now on, if you want to see the galleries and all the photos from North America, then you'll need to go to this page: http://journals.worldnomads.com/sarahandphilusa where you'll find the photo galleries listed down the right hand side as usual. We'll still be putting all our stories on the original site though.
