Saturday Roadtrip.

Craig and I love Saturday Roadtrips; our girls love it too, but only because they have no other choice but to come with us! It's been a tradition for us to take advantage of the one day we have to ourselves as a family and hit the road to see what the area we are living in has to offer. Our day started off in downtown Montreal at the Mount Royal Park. Montreal is such an interesting city and this park, centered in the Montreal center, is a large hill with a lake and hiking trails. Basically, the city is spread out around the base of this hilly park. We headed up for a short hike and picnic, since we'd never had a chance to visit this major park before. While getting our electronic parking pass, a couple came up to us and asked in french if we wanted to take their all-day pass, since theirs hadn't expired yet. How nice! We accepted it and made sure to pay the ticket forward when we left the park - since it was good all day.


The girls had fun with their picnic. Cici complained a lot about the ants, I don't blame her, I was too! But we had fun and the girl's had a chance to run around in bushes and trees. Check here for more pictures. After the picnic, we headed out of the city to the New York border crossing. We took highway 15 south to Plattsburgh, a small S.U.N.Y town. It sits on a huge, and I mean huge, lake called Lake Champlain. We'd taken this roadtrip before but never without snow, and the lake frozen, so it was nice to be going with sunny 80 degree weather. We stopped at Plattsburgh Bay, home to the Samuel Champlain monument, founder of Quebec, City, Quebec.


The girls promptly found the cement stairs that led down into the water, so we sat at the base of the steps and put our feet into the lake.

While walking around this monument and grassy area we kept getting wafts of a fragrant scent. It smelled so good! We kept smelling the flowers around us to see if that's what was making the scent. Finally, we looked up and saw these beautiful white clusters of flowers hanging from all the trees surrounding this park. I've been searching the internet trying find the name - can anyone help me? Have you seen these flowers?

There were several people sitting along the edge of the waterfront at the Champlain monument fishing. The girls kept going up to one of the men sitting close to where we were putting our feet in the water and asking him if he had caught any fish. The man was very patient with them! Afterwards, we sat for this picture and made our best fish kiss!

After Plattsburgh, we headed east for about 45 minutes to High Field Park, home to a beautiful waterfall. Click here to see more pictures of us climbing down to the waterfall. It was really beautiful! We started to hike over closer to the falls and a young man came up and asked us if we would like him to take a picture of our family. Here is the result:

We rarely take such a good photo, especially something as impromptu as this photo was! Don't we look great! The last photo at the bottom is of the entire falls.

We were done with the falls hike about 7:30 p.m. We headed back over the border into Montreal and stopped at the Orange Julep for some Orange Julep. We couldn't leave without some onion rings too, but as I was biting into the first one I felt something hard. My temporary crown that was supposed to last 2-3 weeks had fallen out. I guess I know where I'm going this week! Despite the crown, it was a great family Saturday road trip.

To see all our photos click HERE!