What we did for our summer vacation

Family vacation: victory!!!

Happy to say that Providence Schools and Beyond has returned, or more properly, I have returned from vacation to write it.

We went to Montreal for the week. Loved every minute of it. Took the Metro everywhere, learned a very little bit more French, really enjoyed seeing the world from a different perspective.

We experienced much but of course left wishing we had many more days to explore and get to know Montreal. I left obsessed with RESO/La Ville Souterraine,  Montreal's underground city tunnel network. It is AMAZING, the largest underground network in the world. Elias and I walked for nearly an hour down there one night and barely covered any of it. It links well over a hundred kilometers of hotels, malls, supermarkets, shopping centers, apartments, government buildings, civic centers, arts and cultural buildings, all connected by Metro stations. As long as you pop up to the surface to get some vitamin D from time to time, you really could live down there - not that you'd really want to since Montreal is so fantastic but on a very cold and snowy day, I totally get the appeal, and just think that such a massive urban planning effort as a citywide underground network is supercool. 

Drove home through the Lake Champlain area into Vermont, stopped at the Ben and Jerry's factory and spent the next day at the Shelburne Museum. Also very excellent. And now we're back for the last week of summer vacation for the guys - school starts August 30.