Epic East Coast - Day 0

In less than a day, we take off for a massive seven week trip up and down the east coast of the United States, with additional stops in the big Canadian cities in Ontario and Quebec.  It is going to be a long and crazy trip and possibly even a little bit fun.

A bit of background, in case anyone is wondering how I managed to get seven weeks of holidays.  My previous employer offered a bonus six weeks of holidays after your seventh year of employment, as a unique and fun employee retention policy (as the extra holidays were forfeited if you left the company before taking them).  I was eligible for my extra six weeks in the spring of last year, which was right around the time that many discussions were occurring regarding my change in jobs.  I won't get into all the private details in a public blog, but at the end of it all, I changed jobs last summer and my new job granted me an extra four weeks of holidays this year.

Sandra, being someone who loves to travel, had long planned to use the extra holidays to go on a grand summer trip with the kids, and our original plan was to take the trip last summer while our house was being renovated.  Imagine coming home to brand new house!  The delay incurred by my job change meant that we had to push the trip back to this year, but I think I'm OK with that.  I don't believe that dealing with a contractor while being away from the city would have worked great, even if we had a designer and a person we trusted in charge of everything.  Also, the extra year has allowed Bradley to get bigger and better able to travel.  I've been rereading the blog posts from all our old trips and I've realized that traveling with a small baby puts a lot of stress on a trip.  As everyone is older, this trip should be better in that regard, even though there are now six of us, which is going to create its own unique challenges.

As for the trip, we are flying out to Toronto, but from there we are spending the rest of the trip on trains, since it is a much simpler and calmer way to travel, even if it isn't as quick.  There are a few places where we are going to rent a car, but many of the cities we plan on visiting have robust public transit systems, so we should be able to walk/bus/subway to wherever we want to go.  I'm afraid I don't have the exact details of the trip straight in my head, but we are planning to visit Toronto, New York, Washington DC, Charlotte, Orlando and the Keys.  We'll also visit Montreal and Quebec City, since it's much cheaper for us to stay in Canada than the US, thanks to the low value of the dollar at the moment.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of trying to get things ready, including dealing with my awful yard, lining up people to live in our house and ensuring we had everything we needed for such a long trip.  Tomorrow morning we get up super early and board a flight for Toronto, where we are going to spend the first few days of a very long family vacation.