destination: Canada.

Over Memorial Day weekend, my friend and I took a road trip to Canada. She had the week off work and had plans that fell through and I had a three day weekend at work so she asked if I wanted to go somewhere. She mentioned Canada and I agreed because I have a passport and I'd never been before.

I wanted to do a layout to sort of summarize our trip and I found a Kelly Purkey Canada stamp set and Canada themed project life cards at Studio Calico and I knew a pocket style page was the answer. I had some random photos I wanted to scrapbook of us crossing the border, what their diet Coke bottles look like, the pandas at the zoo, and the payphones. We couldn't believe they still had payphones - and they were being used! I haven't seen a payphone in years!

Some of the other differences we noted (besides the obvious - currency and the metric system) were that they use "washroom" instead of bathroom or restroom. They said "brown bread" instead of wheat bread. When I asked for a Captain and diet they called it "spiced rum." The areas where we were just seemed more clean and the air more fresh than the US. We also noted that people weren't walking around glued to their phones like they do in the US.

We drove across the border Friday after I got off work. We found a hotel in Chatham late Friday night/early Saturday morning. By this time I'd been up since 5am and was literally falling asleep while she was driving. We got up Saturday morning refreshed and headed into Toronto. We were too early to check into the hotel so we hit up the Toronto Zoo, which was huge. We walked so much that my feet ached at the end of the day. After the zoo we went to check in at our hotel, which was amazing, showered, and decided to hit the hotel bar/restaurant for drinks/dinner. Our bartender was hilarious and we stayed a couple of hours chatting with him. It was so interesting to learn all the differences between the US and Canada. I guess I don't really think about Canada but it just seems like an extension of the US and it's easy to forger it's an entirely different country. Conversation about the differences between our countries turned to strip clubs and he told us there was a male strip club right down the road. We had a couple more drinks (and two shots on him) and we walked a couple blocks to this strip club. 

Imagine our surprise when it was a female strip club. We met a bachelor party celebrating there and actually stayed a while and chatted with them. We walked back to our hotel exhausted and crashed. Sunday morning we woke up to go tree top trekking. Layout coming soon on this adventure, but let me just say this is one of the scariest things I've done in my life.  

On Sunday night we went to Niagara Falls. We had a night tour with fireworks which was pretty cool (but cold and wet). Monday morning we woke up and headed home.

supplies
stamps: Kelly Purkey (Kelly's Destination; Out in the Sunshine; Oh, Canada!); Studio Calico (Aloha add on kit); Sweet Stamp Shop (Across the Miles)
ink: Memento (Tuxedo Black); Staz On (claret; jet black); 
embossing powder: Ranger super fine detail (silver)
ephemera: Pink Paislee (Atlas)