A Fun Weekend and the Worst Vacation Ever (Thanks for nothing, Quebec)

For Spring Break we went on a two part trip. First we went to visit my friend, Tracie, in Green Island, NY and then we went to Quebec City in Canada. Jonathan wanted to name this post, "You Know What Country Sucks? Canada" so that gives you an idea about how the second part of our trip went.

Tracie's was fun though! Lincoln's favorite part was her two cats. He's never really spent much time around animals, so these cats were a huge novelty. He would chase them around and just laugh. The cats, of course, were running for their lives from what, I can only assume, they thought was a huge monster... After a while everyone calmed down a bit and the cat let Lincoln get close enough to touch him.


On Saturday we drove to Saratoga Springs and walked around for a bit. It was a pretty cute little town with a beautiful park and some great shopping (translation: we found a Banana Republic). We're starved for shopping here in Ithaca.

My Florida scrapbooks are full of pictures of Tracie eating, so I thought I should include this picture of her drinking from the actual freshwater springs of Saratoga Springs.

Here's a picture of us with Tracie and her boyfriend, Adam, on the main street of Saratoga Springs.


It was a lot of fun for us to get to know Adam over the weekend, and for Tracie to get to know Lincoln.


I love this picture of Lincoln and the cat, Mason.


Then the trouble began. We left Tracie's on Monday after a long morning of waiting for, and subsequently cleaning up, vomit. Lincoln wasn't feeling very good but was nevertheless in a pleasant mood and seemed unfazed by his malady. He would simply pause, gag, vomit, and then continue about his merry business. Despite Lincon's condition, the doctor gave us the go ahead to continue with our trip and we headed on our way. The drive to Quebec City went fine and that evening we drove around a little bit to get a feel for the city before returning to our hotel room for the night.

The next morning we woke up to a blizzard outside. It was snowing like crazy and the wind was blowing at about 38 mph. If just Jonathan and I were on this trip this might not have been too bad, but having a toddler along changes things. We wrapped Lincoln up in the Moby Wrap, though and ventured out to the Parliament of Quebec, home of the confusingly-titled "National Assembly" for the Province of Quebec.

It was really a beautiful building. We were the only one's on our tour, so that was nice. Our tour guide told us, "Oh it's too bad you're here now.... two weeks ago it was like summer!" Too bad indeed.





After the Parliament we decided to go get some lunch. We went to a restaurant not far from the Parliament building called La Pointe des Ameriques, a specialty pizzeria. The pizza tasted good going down, but was not nearly as good coming back up (it never is). We got food poisoning. I blame Jonathan's pizza because he had it the worst, but it was not pleasant and I am on my way to TripAdvisor right now to write a review.

Needless to say, we spent the rest of the evening in the hotel room while Jonathan "expressed himself" (vomited a lot). It didn't hit me until the middle of the night, so I was able to take care of Lincoln, but he did a pretty good job of entertaining himself.



The next day it was still snowing, but the wind had stopped blowing. We tried to go out but we felt too weak to do much of anything. We didn't even take any pictures. We decided to get lunch (even though I was feeling a little suspicious of Canadian restaurants at this point) before heading back to the hotel. This restaurant, Le Cochon Dingue, was good and didn't make us sick. We did, however, get a parking ticket outside of it and our right blinker bulb went out. I was not amused.

We went back to the hotel and took naps and when we woke up the snow had finally stopped. We decided to give Quebec one more shot and to try and take some pictures. We stopped at the citadel.

It was closed.

So we decided to go take some pictures of the outside of the Parliament building since it was the one Quebec attraction we had actually experienced.


It was pretty chilly out, so we had Lincoln nice and bundled up.


Old Quebec really does look quaint. Maybe we'll go back one day. In August. Maybe.

And here is the final blow. It took forever to get out of the city. The traffic was atrocious. We could not wait to get back to the good ole USA.

So you really let us down on this one, Canada. Maybe after we've had some time to heal and forget we'll try and visit you again, but no promises.