Thursday, August 27, 2009

Road Trip


I MADE IT! 9 days. 2 countries. 3 states. 1300 miles. PURE BLISS. As some of you know, I went on an all girls ROAD TRIP. On Saturday, August 15th at 3:45 AM We embarked on our journey. That's right 3:45 AM. We flew out of Charlotte on a 6:45AM, which enabled us to see some of the sights in Burlington, Vermont before we headed up to Montreal. Our first stop was Magic Hat Brewery a.k.a Magic in your mouth! What I loved about the Magic Hat Brewery was the fun, quirky nature of the employees and product. Also, you just walk up to a bar and they keep refilling your glass with whatever beer you choose. FOR FREE. We paid nothing for our tour/tasting. THEY. ARE. AWESOME. Also, our tour guide had dreadlocks—nuff said! After our beer tasting, we were all feeling pretty nice (except Mary Frances=Designated Driver). Our next task was to cross the US/Canadian Border, which we were all pretty sure we would breeze right through. Right? NOT. After waiting an hour, watching all the Quebecians (our term of endearment—which we later discovered is what they are actually called) smoke their cigarettes.
Our hold up at the border caused us to miss a Cidery tour, we planned on going to in Quebec. Of course, we all knew that they spoke french in Quebec, but we hadn't fully prepared ourselves. After entering the country, we realized our car did not have kilometers on the speed gauge. NOT GOOD! We frantically converted the kilometers to mph on our cellphone. After figuring out all of the french conversion/translations, we headed to Amelie's. My roommate Christen studied abroad with Amelie and she invited us all to stay with her. She was formerly a tour guide in the city, so she was the perfect person to show us around. Our first day in Montreal, we visited the Clock Tower and climbed all 182 stairs. Other sites included but were not limited to: the Biodome of Montreal, the Olympic Stadium, Mont Royal and L'Oratoire. We departed from Montreal on Tuesday and started our 8 hr trek to Maine. This was a gloomy day, fun—but frustrating to be in the car for that long. Luckily, we had stops along the way, so we could take a break from driving.
Maine is beautiful, but there would be stretches 50 miles with NO civilization. Make sure you have a full gas tank! The scenery was beautiful, it took all I had not to make the girls stop every 10 minutes so I could photograph. We drove through Mexico, Maine. Didn't even know it existed.
We were so excited to be in Maine, with the hopes that we would see a MOOOSE. No such luck :( We had high hopes and they were shattered. We did visit Acadia National Park. Highly recommend! We drove up to Cadillac Mountain at dusk. With the breeze in our hair and the water below, it was picturesque. Now our Maine excursion would not be complete without a casualty. Christen lost her Blackberry to a tide pool. PLEASE USE EXTREME CAUTION WHEN PHOTOGRAPHING A SEA URCHIN WITH YOUR BLACKBERRY. So with one phone dead, we decided to move on to our next stop: Portsmouth, New Hampshire. History. Lighthouses. Beer. We visited Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's childhood home. Very interesting, our tour guide was amazing. We saw the most beautiful lighthouse in Portsmouth. PICTURE TIME! Portsmouth was very nice, although I don't think it was Christen and Amanda's favorite city. They had a little tooo much to drinky drinky :)
We concluded our trip in Burlington, Vermont. FIRST STOP: Ben and Jerry's Factory. As you can tell by their creative flavors, they are a HOOT. They have a flavor graveyard for all of their “discontinued” flavors. It was super cute. A little disappointed that the “taste testing” was only on ONE flavor. Come on Ben & Jerry—we need more than that! It was delicious nonetheless. We also stopped at Cabot. CHEESE, CHEESE, and MORE CHEESE. It was very good. Now they had every type of cheese you could ever, ever want to try. This was the conclusion to our trip. We flew home the next morning. Refreshed, renewed, EXHAUSTED! :)

2 comments:

  1. Yay, Jennie! I love this post. Sounds like it was a great time, and we really missed you!!

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