No, I suppose it wasn't THAT bad. In fact, overall we had a pretty spectacular time. Hmm. Where do I begin?
We had this trip planned for months. Some of our close friends from our Toronto days invited us to their wedding, which sparked the whole voyage. We decided to make the wedding an excuse to do a big ol' family road trip to Ontario to visit my husbands family, our friends, and of course, to attend the wedding.
3 week road trip? With a baby? Pfft no problem! We'll take it slow and roll with the punches. Ahhh so naive, we were.
We packed our bags, Sadie's bags, Sadie's toys, Sadie's gear, and Sadie's food, and headed west. I once backpacked around South America for 2 months with a knapsack and water bottle. The times have certainly changed.
After 2 days of driving and 2 nights of sleeping (courtesy of the Econo Lodge, and my welcoming and lovely aunt and uncle), we reached our first destination, my in-laws rental cottage on an island in Algonquin Park.
* Since I'm a self proclaimed foodie, I have to quickly blurb about our food stops en-route. Timmy Ho's, Subway, and more Timmy Ho's (coffee, coffee, java, java, ya, ya, ya). We also dined in a couple of family friendly diners in Quebec. I use family friendly loosely. We walked into a restaurant called "Restaurant" (that should have steered us away right off the bat, but Sadie was hungry and they had high-chairs), sat down in the packed, yet eerily silent dining room, and ate our shitty food shamefully while Sadie schreeched and squeeled LOUDLY in delight at her peas and rice pudding. The head shakes and eye rolls made it pretty clear that our kind wasn't welcomed there.
We totally redeemed ourselves, though, when we stopped for lunch at Montreal's Cafe Santropol. We were greeted with servers smiling and gushing over our baby, sat in a garden patio, where Sadie could hurl her watermelon and bread in any direction she pleased, and ate some of the best sandwiches we've ever encountered.
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| Noshing at Cafe Santropol, Montreal |
Ok, back to the cottage in Algonquin Park. Long story short: mosquitos + snoring + other nighttime noises = Sadie waking every 15 minutes + the whole cabin waking every 15 minutes = a short cottage trip + a swift drive to Owen Sound to decompress in my husband's parent's country home. We ate, slept, swam, and regained our sanity. Bliss!
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| The Little Mermaid |
