Oct. 16 The original plan for the day was quite an aggressive one. Up real early (6:30am), catch the metro, transfer to the yellow line, hook up with a local bus and get to Mount Vernon by about 10am. Unfortunately Melissa had been working on a nasty cold for the last couple days, and it hit pretty hard by the end of the hockey game. So we decided to skip Mount Vernon this trip, wake up a little later and begin the day with a tour around Arlington National Cemetary. The weather had gotten no better, so the day was [View Full Entry]

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Oct. 15 We woke up to a little misting of rain, and unfortunately it was the best weather we would see the rest of the week. The first spot of the day was our reserved tour of the US Capitol building. We started off with a healthy breakfast of McDonalds before jumping on the subway and making our way to the east side of the National Mall. One thing we quickly realized about touring DC is that you have to be prepared and leave time for security. The US capitol doesn't allow any food, water, large backpacks, guns, knives, RPG [View Full Entry]

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Oct. 13th We planned to spend the day in Southern Manhattan today, starting off with the tours of Libery Island and Ellis Island. We had reserved the first boat of the day, leaving the harbour at 9am, so we had to catch a subway at around 8. It was our first trip with the NYC subway, and after a couple false starts getting through the turnstiles, we were on our way. Once we got on the boat, the first stop was Liberty Island. We picked up our audioguides, and went through the museum located in the pedestal beneath the statue [View Full Entry]

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Since our first blog documenting our Egypt/Italy trip was an overwhelming success by all critics, we thought we'd continue on and do one for our trip to NY and Washington, DC with Melissa's mom and dad. The trip got off to a bit of a slow start with a combination of an early snow storm and Air Canada computer problems, delaying our original flight to Ottawa by about 5 hours. On the plus side it did allow us time to have our first, and unfortunately only celebrity sightings of the trip, Doc Walker and liberal leader Jon Gerrard, very exciting... After [View Full Entry]

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We sufficiently ran Mom and Dad into the ground sightseeing, so we did our own thing for their last day, and planned to meet for supper. We really had only one more site left on our list for major sights we wanted to see, the Roman catacombs. We had actually seen some catacombs at Alexandria in Egypt, but we wanted to check out these ones as well. There are a number of catacombs you can go to around Rome, we decided on the catacombs of San Callisto from the guidebook's recommendations. The Roman catacombs began in the 2nd century, primarily because [View Full Entry]

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Pompeii was pretty high on our list of sights for this trip, so we were looking forward to the trip. Unfortunately the weather did not appear to want to cooperate with us today. We got up fairly early, and due to the pouring rain outside, decided to take a cab to Termini station, where we could catch our train. We chose to take the 2.5 hour regional train for about 14 Euro, rather than the 1.5 hour Eurostar for like 35 Euro, so it was a bit of a slower trip. To get to the actual ruins of Pompeii site, you [View Full Entry]

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The last of our tours with Jerry was the Ancient Rome tour, which included the Roman Forum and Colosseum. The tour was first thing in the morning, so after breakfast the 4 of us walked down to the Colosseum (20 minutes from the hotel) for the meeting point, in the rain of course. It was looking to be a pretty dreary day for a tour, but luckily once we actually got into the Forum to start the tour, it stopped raining for us. There is not much left intact from the Forum, so it is generally recommended to have a guide, [View Full Entry]

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Day 2 of Rome was our Vatican City day. We had a tour scheduled for the Vatican Museums with Jerry in the afternoon, so we planned to spend the morning touring St. Peter's Basilica. Already too many Euro into the trip at this point, we were looking for ways to save a few bucks here and there. Since you can't cut down on the sightseeing in my opinion, food seemed to be the easiest place to cut. So today's plan was to swipe some cookies and melba toast from the hotel breakfast, and that could be lunch. Along the walk to [View Full Entry]

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March 2 - Our flight in from Cairo went without a hitch, and we touched down in Rome early afternoon. As expected, having spent the last couple weeks in Egypt, we knew we were in for a different type of culture shock, the money culture shock. I had arranged a transfer from the airport before we left with Romecabs, because we didn't want to deal with our baggage on the train into town, well known for the pickpockets. It was nice to be picked up by a Mercedes van, but handing over the 45 Euro ($75 Cdn) for the ride wasn't [View Full Entry]

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Day 12 - Day trip to Alexandria We had 2 new drivers for the trip to Alexandria and got off to a bit of a sketchy start with them. On the way out of Cairo, the road they intended to take was under construction. It was a 4 lane separated highway, and only our northbound lanes were under construction, so our driver cooly pulled into oncoming traffic. His combination of honking and flashing the lights notified the oncoming traffic to give us a lane to drive in until we could cut back onto the other side of the median. We thought [View Full Entry]

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