Canadian Adventure - Quebec City

Time for some picture overload! We just got back from our Adventure trip to Canada! We spent a week up in the province of Quebec.  First on our stops was the capital - Quebec City!  Ben and I love traveling and would love to go back to Europe and take the boys, but lets face it..... 5 plane tickets + other travel costs are just not in the cards for us right now.  So someone told Ben that he should check out Quebec City.  It still has a ton of European influence, both with the old architecture, language, food and culture. The city sits on the St. Lawrence River and was actual built as a fortified city.  Since then it has been expanded outside of the fort, but the fort walls still remain, so there is a "lower city" outside the fort and an "upper city" that is still in the fort.  Needless to say we did a LOT of walking and climbing hill and stairs :)  It made us not feel so bad for all the junk food and beers we had!

 We drove through the night so we had made it into Canada for breakfast time.  And what else is there to eat in Canada....... Tim Hortons.  The boys instantly became obsessed with their donut holes called Tim Bits (or Tim Nuggets as Adam called them) and want to buy their Uncle Timmy tons and tons of timbits :)

 Caleb liked them too!

 We stopped outside of Montreal for lunch.  We found a nice park with a very pretty view of the river to have a picnic.

 Ahhhh we made it! The first day was just hanging out, finding some food and strolling around a park we found.

 Time to explore!

 This is a view of an old castle, now hotel.  It was beautiful and huge!

 There were cannons EVERYWHERE in the city, which the boys thought was really cool.

 Just so much going on down every street!

 and tons of awesome fountains and "squares" around the city.

 We found ice cream!! (well gelato...... they liked it!)

 boys with their Daddy.

 There was this snow globe thingy in a square in the lower part of the city.  The boys loved it and pretty much wanted 1000 pictures in front of it.

Cobblestone and hanging street lights are my favorite.

The next day we let the boys pick things to day.  Lucas was up first and wanted to go see this fountain because it looked like a volcano erupting.

Poor Lucas needs to be a couple inches taller for the stacked brother's picture :)

Then Adam wanted to go to a different park that we had been the day before because it was a loading area for the horse drawn carriage rides and he wanted to see the horses.  They happened to be doing a demonstration of the French army while we were there.

The boys were brave and got their picture taken with the soldiers.

Ben took Caleb out while the older two got a nap.  Caleb got a nap in the car that day.

Cheers to 9 years for me and Ben :)  We celebrated our anniversary (a day early since it was supposed to rain on the real day) in Quebec City.

Everyone was excited for some dinner.

Since we ate outside Caleb decided to wave to everyone ;)

Poor Adam really wanted to go into this church but every time we came by (which was 3 different times) it was closed :(  So he settled to have his picture taken with it instead.

Then Lucas wanted to as well.

Fun display in the streets in the lower part of Quebec

more pictures with the snow globe.

We saw a moose!

One day we went to Parc de la Chute-Montmorency, which was about 20 minutes outside of the city.  It's taller than Niagara falls but skinnier.

The rainbow from the mist was perfect!

We climbed ALL of the stairs.

This was about half way.

We made it back to the city and the boys enjoyed a macaroon.

On our way to our next  destination we stopped at Île d'Orléans an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.  They had a chocolate shop, so we had to stop :)

And get a picture with a cool looking old car. 

One our way back through Quebec City at the end of our trip (we stopped for lunch) we stopped to the "Ice House" because it was Adam's favorite spot.  In the winter the city has a huge snow/ice festival.  They even make a hotel out of ice that people can stay in!  This little mobile storage box that they converted into a "Quebec Winter" was so cold, but the boys loved it.