Weekend Blitz

Just a few short days until our honeymoon! Here’s a brief overview of where we’re headed and how we’re getting there:

Our 24,606 mile trip will take us to 10 countries (including connections) over 16 days:

Part 1 -New York

We’ll fly from Charleston-JFK to New York-JFK  on Delta…

…and spend 1 night in the city to get our fill of the Christmas spirit.

Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree

Part 2 – Bali, Indonesia

Our award ticket starts in New York as we fly out of New York-LGA and, appx 33 hours later, land in Denpasar, [...]

1235 Rue Guy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Thai $$$ – Entrees for 15 – 20 CAD

Ready for a change after consuming several heavy French meals in a row, we looked (again, on Urbanspoon) for a great Thai restaurant. We found one in the Concordia University area, a place with plenty of nightlife around to check out after our meal. Easy subway access, but we, of course, chose to ride our rental bikes.

The restaurant, Phayathai, is on the second story and holds seating for approximately 30 people—pretty small and, again, we’re pretty sure we saw the owner busing tables. There were a few round tables that seat six, but, to be safe, you should probably make a [...]

351 Rue St-Paul Ouest, Montreal, QC Bakery w/ Sandwiches $ to $$ — About CAD 9 – 11 for lunch

After the walking tour, we remained in Vieux Montreal and explored Rue St. Paul. Vieux Montreal, as we learned on our walking tour, is mostly inhabited by tourists. The main street, Rue St. Paul, is lined with restaurants and souvenir shops, and dotted in between is the typical crowd pleaser painted up in gold and throwing gold beads to the crowd–leave it to the Canadians and misinformed college freshmen that body paint is cool.

Love the sign, so typical of Quebec on many levels: [...]

Saturday morning, we were hunting around online to figure out what to do. We had heard great things about Fitz & Follwell Co. bike tours (TripAdvisor), but they didn’t appear to handle last minute reservations very well online and the 4-hour bike tour of the whole city left at 10 a.m. from the Plateau Royal district – the opposite side of town from us. Instead, we discovered that Guidatour (http://www.guidatour.qc.ca/) offers walking tours of Vieux Montreal daily during the summer, departing from Notre Dame (luckily, 5 minutes away from us).

Guidatour review: Tickets are about $20/person for a 90 min tour, which includes a brief visit into Notre Dame. Our tour [...]

Plattsburgh (PBG) airport is served by three carriers–all considered to be “low-cost carriers”:

Alright, so you bit the bullet on the dirt cheap tickets on Spirit Air to head to Montreal but didn’t exactly think that, no matter what the liars at Spirit say, it isn’t like Plattsburgh is a suburb of Montreal — it’s fricken’ 70 miles away — a solid 90 mins.

View Larger Map

So, the getting there is a very important part of your travel [...]

Ahh yes, Spirit Air, the self-proclaimed “America’s Only ULCC-Ultra Low Cost Carrier.” The champions of nickel-and-diming, Spirit charges the customer only for what he uses. If you want to carry-on a bag, you’re welcome to for a fee, but they don’t add it to the ticket cost because they don’t charge those who don’t want the service. No matter what your opinion is on the big change in the airline industry, you can’t deny that Spirit Air has some damn cheap fares on their routes.

Source: spirit.com

I don’t necessarily expect the same level of service on a $40 flight as I do on the $8,000 trans-Atlantic First [...]

Plateau Mont-Royal: 330 Rue Marie-Anne E , Montréal, QC French $$$ — Around 35-50 CAD/person

Hungry for some dinner and wanting to try something French (I mean we are in French Canada, after all), we referred to Urbanspoon and settled on Restaurant Le P’Tit Plateau. When calling to make reservations, they reminded me that they are a BYOB restaurant, meaning they don’t sell any alcohol but have a special license to allow for patrons to bring in their own wine. It’s a new concept to me and I immediately loved it—I mean why pay the 200 to 250% markup on a bottle of wine when they encourage you to bring in your own straight from the wine store? One thing to note, [...]