Oh Canada!

This morning we got up and left for our trip to Canada.  The plan is to spend 12 days in Canada doing research for his dissertation.  He has me along so that we can, hopefully, nearly double the amount of stuff we get photographed.  We have been planning the trip for a while, but I had to keep it under wraps since my husband didn't want to let the entire internet know we were gone to be gone for almost 2 weeks.

The drive was rather boring, but rather rainy.  We spent most of the drive getting rained on while driving on toll roads in New York.  I never really realized how big New York was until I had to drive through much of it. 

Oh New York, big and full of toll roads.

We stopped for dinner right before we crossed the border in Ogdensburg, New York.  We felt kinda like we were already in Canada.  Our cell phones were picking up Canadian towers (so we couldn't call people) and there was a family in the restaurant speaking French.  Having spent much of my life in Texas, I am used to hearing conversations in Spanish, but French was new.

English and French on every sign (it meant they used pictures as much as possible)

I was super nervous about the border crossing.  I had crossed the border into Mexico a few times but that was before you had to have a passport.  I have had my passport for 3 years, but I hadn't yet had a chance to use it.  We drove across the rather high and narrow bridge and I tried very hard to remain calm.  I knew that if I looked nervous, they might get suspicious which might make the border crossing more difficult than it should be.  Our border guard was polite and asked the standard questions plus a few extras, probably to make sure that what we said wasn't just a cover story, and then, after teasing my husband about working on a Ph.D but not remembering to sign his passport (which could have caused all sorts of stressful things for us to happen at the border), we were off to Ottawa.

When we got to our hotel, we checked in and unpacked.  Normally I am anti unpacking in a hotel but since we are here for almost 2 weeks, moving in isn't a bad idea.  I still had a run to get in.  Our hotel is being renovated and the fitness center was closed.  Fortunately, they had made arrangements for guests at our hotel to be able to use the fitness center at the hotel across the street.  I went over at around 9 and did my run.  I had an interesting experience which I wrote about here.  I did accomplish something I never had before, I ran an entire 5K without stopping for a walk break.  I have run 3 different 5Ks, all of which were faster than the one I did last night, but I have taken walk breaks in all of them (though they have gotten shorter and less frequent each time).  It made me super excited to know I could now really say I ran a whole 5K without stopping.

After my run, I headed back, showered and got to bed so that we could get up and get researching tomorrow.

Is there something that you have kind of done before, but got super excited when you did "for real"?  In also get this excited when do I a really solid, "my mom would be so proud" cleaning of some part of my house.