We decided to take the Greyhound bus from Toronto to Boston - not sure if it's worth the saved money. Perhaps if we would have went with a bus company that went to Boston directly, instead of stopping at a bunch of towns along the way, it would have been a nicer experience. But our bus was late leaving Toronto, so we missed our connection in Buffalo, causing us to wait in the Buffalo bus station for roughly 2 hours from 12:30-2:30am. But once again, immediately upon crossing the border, I was struck by the intense friendliness of Americans. I was [View Full Entry]

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Provincetown is located at the tip on Cape Cod. It is a charming little town that is extremely gay friendly - the first thing you will notice upon disembarking the Boston ferry and walking up the dock onto Commercial St. is all the rainbow flags. You will probably also notice before you even get off the ferry that there's an awful lot of gay people who love going to P-Town. But there are also a lot of antique stores and whatnot that cater to the old lady crowd, and there's lots of vacationing families too. We stayed at the Provincetown Inn, [View Full Entry]

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In continuing with our 3 year old Easter in America tradition, we decided to go to the place that was cheapest to fly - New York City! Although we had been to NYC briefly in 2003, we knew we needed to explore one of the greatest cities on earth a bit more thoroughly! We stayed at the Pennsylvania Hotel for only $99 a night. Considering the location - 32nd and 7th, near Penn Station and right across the street from Madison Square Gardens - it was a steal. It's only 2 stars - not exactly a nice hotel. The lobby is [View Full Entry]

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First let me start off by saying that I LOVE HONG KONG!! Seriously, what an awesome city, Hong Kong really sets the standard for international cities. And what a skyline! There's some website out there that ranks Hong Kong's skyline as the best in the world, and I would definitely have to agree. And do they ever know how to showcase it! Every night at 8:00pm, weather permitting, is the Symphony of Lights, a spectacular light show coordinated with music and a lot of the big buildings participating. We spent 9 days in a 3 bedroom apartment in Kowloon, in a [View Full Entry]

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We took the Macau ferry from Hong Kong to spend the day. Our first stop was the Macau Tower, which provided great views of the surrounding area, even though it wasn't a very clear day. It was fun to watch the people bunji jumping from the top of tower. There is also a skywalk thing they have, where you can walk outside along the ledge surrounding the tower (secured in, of course.) It's a pretty neat idea, even if that ledge did get in the way of some of my pictures. We stopped at a random restaurant for lunch, and the [View Full Entry]

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We took the Hong Kong metro into Shenzhen to spend the day. Since we all held Canadian passports, we were able to get a visitors Visas issued right at the border for a fee of 125 CYN each (renminbi/yuan. $1 Canadian = approx. 5.5 CYN). This is much better than the 500-750 CYN we would have had to pay if we went to a Visa place in Hong Kong - where we would have had to hand over our passports for 3-5 days. It was also way cheaper than it would have been if we were to have got Visas at [View Full Entry]

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I am convinced that Thanksgiving Weekend is the best time to go camping. Not only are the campgrounds pretty much empty, but the weather is usually nice and it's the peak of the fall colours. The 3 day weekend was the perfect opportunity for us to drive north to take in the beauty of the season. Our car rental wasn't the little economy car I had requested - but some fancy, luxury Chyrsler car instead. I don't like driving big cars like this, especially since i suck so bad at parking. But I quickly got used to it and thankfully didn't [View Full Entry]

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I love Chicago even more now that I've visited twice. The people are SO friendly! And Grant Park is definately the perfect spot for Lollapalooza. [View Full Entry]

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A while back we had planned to take our van to the Gaspésie so that we could say it brought us from the West Coast of Canada all the way to the East. But we sold the van last fall, and I got a new job and didn't have enough vacation credits to drive that far. But we wanted to visit the Gaspésie anyway, and with Quebec celebrating it's 400th anniversary, this seemed like a good time. We flew from Toronto to Gaspé on Saturday morning. I was quite impressed with Air Canada, because even though there was a huge thunder [View Full Entry]

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San Francisco was awesome. Castro and Haight-Ashbury are difinately my favourite neighbourhoods. It's a shame that the Civic Center area is so crackhead ridden though. The City Hall is beautiful, and the San Francisco Public Library is fantastic too. But you must wade through crackheads before you can enjoy that area. It's gross to see people pissing in beautiful public waterfountains in broad daylight. San Francisco's China Town is absolutely massive. I was thoroughly impressed. It's very hard walking up and down all the hills in China Town trying to see it all though. There's just too mu [View Full Entry]

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