Vacation!!!

Be prepared for a lot of pictures. Truth be told, I'm guessing most people aren't interested in reading about another family's vacation. With that theory, I'm giving those who actually want to read about it several options.

1. Just read this post
2. Go to Cookie and look at the "SHORT VERSION" slide shows.
3. Go to Cookie and look at the "LONG VERSION" slide shows and watch videos.

So, to whatever degree you want to read about our vacation, you can. :o) And of course, the pictures of the kids are on the Cookie blog. These are just the generic pictures and ones of me and Brad.

It started off a little rough. There was lots of flooding in the area and roads were closed leading to backed up traffic on the bridges out of Philly. Not the best start.

For what ever reason, there were TONS of fish eggs in the ocean. A bunch of people were saying they were jellyfish, but as time went on and more and more came, it was clear they were not jellyfish.

This is how many there were when we first arrived:

After an hour or so:

And finally, close to the end of our trip:

Keep in mind, this was just a hand swipe through the water, not a net or something. Oh joy! This picture looked a lot better before I uploaded it, but each black spot is a fish egg. CRAZY! (you can click on the picture to see the detail better)
Here are some real jellyfish and maybe a sting ray stinger we found. And crab shells or something. They were huge!
And this is how the beach looked the second day of our vacation. They closed the beach.
And this is how my knee looked the entire time we were in NJ. Some stupid person *ahem me* forgot to pack her anti-inflammatories. Nice. Oh, how it hurt!
We found this adorable monster shirt in Cape May. It could be yours for the small price of, what was that?! $36?! For a shirt?! Are you kidding me?! I really wanted one, but that was crazy!
And finally, the Montreal, Canada pictures.

Here is the Olympic stadium.

And the botanical gardens.

The next pictures are the view from the top of Mont Real.

Here is the building at the overlook.

Here are some more scenery pictures:

Some just for fun pictures of the money. Pretty, huh.

China town:



Other landmarks:

This is St. Joseph's Basilica

And a crazy building in the middle of the street by the Notre Dame

The Montreal Notre Dame

The Biodome

The Notre Dame college built in 1881. HAHA! My house is older! So there! :o)

The Montreal temple.

A money splurge, besides going to the boardwalk on the beach (which was amazing but I didn't get a single picture) was for day passes on the metro. We spent the day riding around town. The kids loved it! But you'll have to check out a slide show to see them on it. :o)

A TOTALLY AWESOME metro stop. :o) I love Monk. And this stop is where we happened to get poutine. YUMMY!!!!

Brad eating his big ol' plate of poutine from the Green Stop restaurant he loved when he was a missionary there.
A neighborhood in the town we were staying in. No, the town didn't all look like this. These houses are AMAZING!




We had lunch with a sweet lady named Maria that Brad knew from his mission. We ate at an Indian restaurant. YUM!! We had beef vindaloo, naan, samosa, chicken tandori, etc. I love Indian food. The kids did pretty good too! Okay, not really, but as good as you can expect. :o)

The really cool water fall at the base of the dripping water glass thing. LOL!
Here is some of the signage:

The stop signs say ARRET.

And here are 3 pictures I photoshopped into 1 of the street lights. The red was a square, the yellow a diamond, and the green a circle. Have you ever tried to get a picture of a yellow light? It is dang hard. Seriously. It has to be timed so perfectly. We gave up and parked and I just stood there like an idiot waiting for the light to change. Crazy Americans. :o)
You can tell from the picture we had lovely gray skies while we were there. There was even a rare tornado. I think we just bring them with us. When we first moved to MI, they had one. Watch out, Philly.

Not that we ate at any of these places, but American food names there were kinda funny.

Nope, not KFC, it is PFK or Poulet Frit Kentucky. haha!

Notice the maple leaf in the big M.
And because I know you are curious, Burger King was still the same. LOL!

Almost home!!!! Well, back in America at least.
This was the line to get into Canada. When we went into Canada, the line was forever long too. There was no line to get into America. hmmmm....

A couple of stories to explain pictures and stuff:

Jamo got stung by a bee on the top of Mont Royal. Poor kid. He kept his tears to a minimum, but they were probably also caused by not getting any ice cream from the vendor at the top.

We took Emmanuelle with us on our subway day. She was amazing and kept the kids in line. She kept asking Brad why our boys didn't talk about normal stuff like games and things and instead talked about nature (tornado facts, hurricane facts, etc). When we got to Green Stop, the place mat was about a girl with cancer. Of course, they had a billion questions about that since Grandma Jones also has cancer.

We had a lovely time on the boardwalk in NJ. The boys went on their first roller coaster ride. Roo came off of it crying and Jamo said that he liked it except for the parts that went down. haha!

We had such an amazing vacation. And it wouldn't have been possible without some amazing friends. A nurse from Brad's work let us stay with her family at their house near the beach. They were incredibly hospitable. We felt like family with them. I just love them to pieces. And Montreal wouldn't have happened without the amazing Carpentier family who let us stay with them for so long. Their kids were helpful, my children had a blast, and they are already begging to go back. What a blessing amazing friends are.