Jeff, Rich, and I decided to do a quick 3 day weekend trip to Montreal, Canada! Here is a skyline view of downtown from Mount Royal. Yes, it was a bit cloudy that day, but hats off to Jeff for his 9 hour driving abilities (learned that in Charlotte cough cough). Remember to try the Smoked Meat Sandwich - a Monteal specialty. Montreal is the most French speaking city outside of Paris, France!

So we always seem to get lucky with picking random weekends that something exciting is going on in the city. Here in Montral was the International Jazz Festival - so artists from New Orleans, New York, etc came to play and show their stuff. Thousands of folks lined the streets and about 6 stages were set up throughout the city to showcase their stuff.

Gotta check out the Montreal Olympic stadium which hosted the Olympics back in 1976. We ended up walking the entire length of the grounds as Jeff thought he saw a shortcut! Saw the olympic size pool and then some other facilities before our eventual subway trip (subways in Canada are actually great), but in our case someone tried to jump in front of the subcar and the entire Cote Vertu station was evacuated while they handcuffed the suicidal person.

Who are these guys?

Oh and I have speak about Jeff's attempt to be cool during our Border patrol stops. He seemed to have forgotten where he lived which caused the guards to get nervous and thus our car searched. "WEED!" haha

During the Tour of Montreal, we passed Old City Montreal and snapped a shot of the quad area. Nice shop and old school housing.

We later found out that each weekend in Montreal during the summer a different country puts on a HUGE fireworks display lined with music, etc. This week was Italy and they didn't dissapoint. Rich and I tried to run to the bridge to get a better shot, but what looked like 1 mile away quickly turned into 2 or 3....If I could only show you the videos!

I mean seriously... Outside of Casino Montreal

EST, SUD, QUEST? Here's my standard interstate shot

BONUS: The week afterwards Rich, Heather and I went to the 145th showing of the Gettysburg reenactment! This blew away all my expections as over 15,000 reenacters filled Gettysburg's sacred fields to demostrate Pickett's charge. Here's the Union soliders at their stone wall defense going against the Virginian, Mississippi and Alabaman armies of the Confederate. Controlled chaos is the best way to describe these Civil War battles.