Miami, Florida, February 24-28, 2010

Most of the time we were in South Beach; I was tagging along while Jen attended the South Beach Wine & Food Festival . . .

Collins Avenue in South Beach (Jen kept thinking of Vanilla Ice — “Yo so I continued to A1A Beachfront Avenue”):

A couple different walks around South Beach: Espanola Way, Michigan Avenue, Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue. I was on the hunt for stuff that looked like this because I had just seen some Miami Vice reruns:

You can see that Miami Vice look in Lummus Park and along Ocean Drive:

It wasn’t exactly beach weather, but we sat on the sand for a little bit and strolled on the Beach Walk.

We stayed at The Standard. The Miami Beach hotels mostly retain their old-school historic facades, which is cool to see:

Food . . . the venerable Joe’s Stone Crab, La Sandwicherie, Tap Tap Haitian Restaurant and Sra. Martinez (over in Miami’s Design District). All recommended.

Our last day in Miami we rented a car and made it out to the Everglades. The Anhinga Trail, located near the park’s entrance, is just awesome for gawking at alligators:

The birds in this picture are Anhingas (thus the trail’s name):

Vultures are an annoyance at Royal Palm where the Anhinga Trail is, so they are trying different methods of keeping them away, including the old head-on-a-stake trick:

We continued down to Flamingo to take a short boat tour of the interior waters, where we learned the role vultures play in the ecosystem, beyond just annoying visitors to the Everglades. This is an American Crocodile. They are different than alligators, and are found only in this part of the park:

This is the bottom of the continental United States:

Quebec, February 12-15, 2010

Driving up to Montréal and Québec City, we made a pit stop at the world-famous Betty Beavers Truck Stop & Diner in Lewis, New York:

We crossed the border in the waning winter light:

First stop was Montréal, where we stayed at the Hotel Delta. We did it up the first night when we got dinner at DNA (highly recommended) where we ate stuff like veal heart tartare:

The next morning we picked up hooch at the SAQ store near the hotel, then got breakfast to go at St-Viateur Bagel, one of the famed Montreal bagel spots:

Then we drove to Québec City to see the 2010 Québec Winter Festival. On the way up to the hotel, we passed by the facade of the Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, which is balanced precariously on the side of the road leading up to the Haute-Ville in Québec City:

We visited the winter festival back in 2008, but convinced some friends to visit it again, the highlights of which are the snow sculptures and festive night parade:

On the way back to Montréal we made another visit to Restaurant Madrid along Autoroute 20:

We had a smoked meat dinner back in Montréal at Schwartz’s, the other Montréal institution you’re always hearing about. And yes, both Schwartz’s and St-Viateur Bagel are as good as everyone says they are:

We drank at a couple of places on Rue Rachel before hitting up Resto La Banquise for that “fourth meal” of poutine. I doubled down and got poutine with smoked meat:

Some things transcend language:

We spent the last day around Montréal, doing some of the typical Big Mappy type stuff, including a morning walk around St. James United Church, Phillips Square and Wallenberg Square before trying to buy those cool Canada Olympic mittens at The Bay (this was the opening weekend of the Vancouver Olympics) (they were all out of adult-sized mittens):

Breakfast/shopping at Marché Jean-Talon in La Petite-Italie. That’s horse meat for sale:

We drove up to the Camillien Houde Lookout in Parc du Mont-Royal:

We took a furtive drive through Vieux Montréal, tried to take a tour of the Molson Brewery (too late) and drove by the Parc Olympique. The Stade Olympique is so bizarre and cool looking (but such a terrible place to watch baseball):

We bought food at the Christie Magasin d’Économies and Provigo before heading back over the Pont Jacques-Cartier to start our journey back home.

Driving Through New Jersey

The New Jersey Turnpike between 7A and the Lincoln Tunnel:

When you cut through Trenton from Philadelphia via US 1, there’s one of those fantastic “stealth” cell phone towers designed to look like, say, a tree. It took a while but I finally figured out that this one is the TowerCo PA2036 Stealth Tree Tower in Morrisville, Pennsylvania: