The things we do while we wait...

Well March has arrived and we STILL are not in our house yet. One day it will happen (hopefully within the next week or two!), but in the mean time we have been finding things to do to keep us busy and entertained while we wait. Last weekend Garin had a 3 day weekend so we decided to go on a spontaneous road trip.

We left Cape Cod after Garin got home from work and drove all the way up to Stowe, VT (home of the HGTV Dream home...in case you watch that stuff...that is the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear Stowe, VT...think I've been watching way too much HGTV for my own good!). Then the next morning we got up and hit up Smuggler's Notch Ski Resort for some skiing/snowboarding. It was a very uncustomary warm day in Vermont, which made for a wonderful day of skiing...you could actually enjoy your ride up the ski lift instead of feeling like your face was going to freeze off! I actually have some pictures of this ski trip!

After a beautiful day of skiing/snowboarding, we decided that since we were only about 2 hours away from Montreal, Canada, that it would be fun to drive up for the night to check it out (we had considered this before we left the house so we brought our passports with us!).

South of the Border

We arrived in Montreal at about 7 and set out to find some food and check out the city. Montreal is part of the French speaking province of Quebec, so everything was in French, which was a little odd for me. Fortunately Garin minored in French in college so we were able to navigate our way around fairly easily (and I'm sure you could do it even if you didn't know any French because most people are bilingual, being that close to the States). Since it was a rather warm night, the nightlife was hoping and the main street was bustling! We ended up walking down the main street for more than a mile, taking in all of the shops (you could find most mainstream US retailers, plus a few more shady places as well) and enjoying some great people watching!

This was one of the pretty churches all lit up and decorated with winter snowflakes :)

The Art Museum was across the street from our hotel (FYI, we got an awesome hook up on Priceline's Name Your Price!), had some kind of large orb exhibit on its lawn. The music accompanying the light show was really quite eerie. It was really pretty though!

The next morning we went for a walk around the Old Montreal part of the city (which I favored more than the newer part!).
While we were there Montreal was having a neat festival called the "Festival of Lights" (in English). There was a whole block dedicated to community activities such as ice skating, concerts, an ice slide, and then various "activities" throughout the city.

Translated: Montreal Festival of Lights ;)

Outdoor ice skating rink

The famed, ice slide! Unfortunately it was closed for repairs. The previous warm day melted part of it and so they had to replace parts of it with new ice...see ice blocks below.

Another part of the festival was a Cheese Expo. They had about 50 vendors that were there giving out free samples of their cheese! It was a wonderful lunch ;)

After lunch we figured we'd seen most of what we wanted to see, so we started our trek back home to the Cape.

A welcome sight to our eyes, nothing like America!

On our way back home we made one more important stop...the Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Factory in Burlington, VT. I mean, what's a trip to Vermont without a trip to Ben and Jerry's?! So we took a tour of the facilities and then got our obligatory free sample (we sampled some kind that was caramel ice cream with caramel swirl with caramel chips in it...can't remember the name...wasn't really a fan...now if they had substituted all of that caramel with Chocolate I would have remembered the name ;)

Picture with ol' Ben and Jerry :)

Welp, that was our brief but action packed trip. Come join us on one of our adventures sometime!