Category Archives: Travel

Christmas in Central Canada 2025 – Québec City 2

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Previous – Québec City 1

Dec 29 – I slept a bit better that night. The sick people were gone for one thing (though the damage had been done). We had grocery store bagels for breakfast with red pepper hummus and havarti cheese and cucumber. The toaster had one slot broken so Tharash nearly set one half of his bagel on fire. The weather wasn’t that bad, so we went to the lower old town, stopping in on the way at Notre-Dame.

The seminary attached to Notre-Dame; Google tells me it’s now a University School of Architecture. Photo by MH

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Christmas in Central Canada 2025 – Québec City 1

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Previous – Ottawa

Dec 28 – This day was going to have the nicest weather of our stay in Québec City, so we decided to go to Montmorency Falls first. I was a bit miserable after such bad sleep the night before, so Tharash went out to a little bakery and got me a chocolate croissant, himself an almond croissant, and a cappuccino to split between both of us.

But we went to the train station to buy bus tickets, and I nearly managed to order them in French and understand the lady, but then she asked a question that was a bit confusing even when she switched to English (basically the number of fares we needed – four in total, for two people to go there and back).

Copper roof! Photo by MH

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Christmas in Central Canada 2025 – Ottawa

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Previous – Montreal

Dec 22 – Transit day! We took the metro to the central train station. The train was half an hour late. Between that and all the hassle of lining up and getting bags weighed and tickets checked 3 times, Tharash will never complain about NS again lol. I think probably VIARail is more comparable to the InterCity trains, but again – nobody queues for those like there’s only one door to the train. Can we go to where our traincar will be before it arrives, for greater efficiency? What is a platform for if not for waiting on??? This sounds like a philosophical question but it is not.

Anyway we began seeing more snow towards Ottawa and by the time we arrived I think it was actually snowing a bit. This is what we signed up for, so we were happy to see it. My Uncle M, who we were staying with, picked us up and took us to the house to put down our bags. They had just finished renovating the dining room the day before and only just cleaned up stuff temporarily stored in the spare rooms that morning. And my Aunt B and some other family were in Toronto for a funeral. Busy time! This post is all about my family, sorry haha I have a lot of family in Ottawa.

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Christmas in Central Canada 2025 – Montreal

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My best friend is going to spend next summer sailing, so we decided to spend winter break on vacation together instead of next summer. This was again going to be a challenge weather-wise, but in the opposite way of the summer.

My mom took me to MEC (now Canadian-owned again!) and they had the exact kind of sweater I had been looking for – black, full-length front zipper, no hood, pockets – to replace the Norwegian-style knit sweater I’d used until it wore holes in both elbows, so I bought that, and my mom bought me a puffy down vest identical to one that she wears every day. I also bought reusable chemical hand warmers on a different trip.

And I got me some new hiking boots, because someone else on the Internet was like “I went on vacation in Montreal with just hiking boots and double wool socks instead of buying winter boots that I’ll never use again”, and I had given away my previous hiking boots some time ago because my feet changed shape or something and they were no longer comfortable. My new boots are not as cute as my old boots, but once they were broken in (a task I foolishly did not do beforehand) they did keep my feet warm and dry more or less, with the help of double-layering socks, and the tread had pretty good grip on the ice we encountered. I could go on for several paragraphs about socks and my quiet-but-strong preferences thereof (neurodivergence yay?) and how many I’ve acquired this year and why, but that’s probably not interesting to most people, with the exception that someone from one of my choirs also gave me a lovely pair of hand-knit socks, in festive red and green, which was very nice! Continue reading →

Haarlem

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Previous – Archeon

The morning of my last day, we went back into downtown Amsterdam: I had a mission. We were up kind of early because I really wanted to go to Fantasy Shop Chimera, a goth/witchy shop that I’d learned about a few years ago. It is a very big shop, two stories tall, and filled with many things. I didn’t really walk in with a specific desire in mind, I just wanted to look at everything. They had hundreds of statuettes of different themes – Norse gods, Egyptian gods, fairies, dragons, unicorns, mermaids, elves, if it was fantasy-themed they had some. Of course they had incense and gemstones, notebooks and tote bags and little signs that said “Frog Parking Only – All Others Will Be Toad”.

The clothing in general appealed to me less than I thought, even though I had vaguely hoped to get some really cool clothes completely different from clothes I already had. Getting a graphic T-shirt like with a unicorn or a dragon on it kind of appealed to me, but I already have plenty of T-shirts (and if I got one with a hot fairy then I would just look less hot in comparison, wouldn’t I?). The goth/rave stuff had a pre-distressed look that doesn’t really appeal to me. But eventually I found a cobalt blue handkerchief-hem dress that looked an awful lot like the “pirate princess” dress I bought at a summer festival in my last place of residence many years ago and wore until the skirt started falling apart at the seams (which wasn’t that hard, really, it was not the best-made thing). This one looks a bit better made. Cost $100CAD, but honestly for something hand-made from natural fibres that’s way too cheap. Although the shop lady asked if I’d tried it on, and I said no, because it was a “one-size-only” deal, and she reminded me that there were no returns on clothes, and I said I was going back to Canada tomorrow, and she said that if it didn’t fit I could always gift it or something. Which… I was over the weight I want to be, but I wasn’t that big!! What the hecc!? It actually fits perfectly so I don’t know what she was worried about. It has a lace-up top so when I lose the weight I want to, it will still fit fine.

Anyway, Betameche also bought a little owl figurine and named it Ada as a gift for a friend. : ) Continue reading →

Archeon

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Previous – The Dunes

Last couple days of my trip were upon us, and at some point we decided to take the second-last day and go to an outdoor historic theme park called Archeon. It’s kind of geared towards kids, but Tharash was like “you’ve got a lot of inner kid” and I acceded to his assertion.

The park is built on the outside of Alphen aan den Rijn, a bit southwest of Amsterdam, and one reason we decided this would be a good activity was because our friend Betameche was coming to visit from Belgium, and this would be less far to travel than all the way to Amsterdam. Tharash met him while sailing last year, and invited him to join our D&D group, and he’s a fun guy to play with… if somewhat chaotic as a gamer. When we met him at the train station, he was wearing a nerd shirt that said “Woke-on-LAN”, which he explained to me: “Wake-on-LAN” is when you wake up a computer from sleep mode via a LAN connection, but his shirt showed a computer port and a rainbow. Continue reading →

The Dunes

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Previous – Valkenburg

Tharash still had blister band-aids from the last time I was in Europe (my feet are not tough at all) and it worked like magic – today we did a 10k round trip through the coastal dunes to the beach and back.

I’d made a request to come here after he posted a picture of a big fat snail from this area in one of his personal Google photo albums, because these snails are pretty neat: they use calcium from the sand in the dunes to build their shells. Here’s the Wikipedia article, though it doesn’t mention about the calcium. Continue reading →

Valkenburg

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Previous – Zuid Limburg

So I woke up with a blister from all the hours of walking I’d done the previous day, but it wasn’t so bad yet (eventually it took over most of my left middle toe lol). We picked up things for breakfast and lunch at a convenience store, and ate breakfast on benches outside the train station. We missed the bus, but we were still a bit early, so we took the train instead. This was the first time in the Netherlands that I took a train that wasn’t NS – apparently in an attempt to cut costs, NS divested itself of a bunch of minor lines a while ago, so this one is run for instance by Arriva. You can still use the same transit card, but you have to boop the Arriva card machine instead of the NS card machine. And if you are arriving by NS and then taking an Arriva train (or vice versa, of course), you have to sign out of the NS machine and then back in to the Arriva machine to continue on your journey.

Which really wasn’t a big deal since at this point, we were only taking Arriva. Valkenburg is a nice little town, though to cross the main car street (Geneindestraat) that lies between the train station and the historic city took a LONG time even with the fancy timed crosswalks. The historic city is pretty nice, and the Klein Geul river runs through it, which eventually ends up in the Maas just north of Maastricht. Continue reading →

Zuid Limburg

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Previous – Maastricht

Fully a third of all Tharash’s trip pictures were taken on this day, I think he might like this place. I also took a lot of pictures, so… this will probably have the most pictures of any post on this trip.

This day we went to the hostel’s dining room for breakfast; it’s a breakfast buffet that’s only an extra 10 euros, for which you can make as many broodjes as you like, or get boiled eggs, or yogurt, or cereal. Probably some other stuff too, I didn’t make a list. We’d also gotten the lunch package, where they give you a bag with some pre-prepared stuff and then you can make more broodjes from the breakfast material to put in it. The paper lunch bags were a bit big, so we transferred the materials to our backpacks – and the bottled water to our own waterbottles.

Then we headed out. Over a pedestrian bridge, past the Maastricht Museum, and to a bus stop under some trees. The bus went past the European Union monument; did you know the European Union agreement in 1993 was signed in Maastricht? They seem quite proud of it. Also the stars on the monument spin under certain conditions which is pretty funny and neat. The bus ride out to our destination was about half an hour, and then we had to walk another 15-20 minutes to get to the start of the walking tour we were going on. Continue reading →

Maastricht

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Previous – the Drentsche Aa

Sorry for the delay; first I was tired and didn’t feel like blogging for a bit, and then I was in the process (still am in the process really) of switching over to Linux because I’d like an operating system that doesn’t have a stupid nosy spying algorithm in it, THANKS Microsoft. As a Windows-girlie for the past 29 years, being on Kubuntu now has been a learning curve. Like I had to format my HDD so I could play my Steam games, and it took me 3 days to figure that out. And, relevant to this blogging endeavour, I had to find a new photo editing program. There are a bunch of things Linux does well, like it starts up super fast because it doesn’t have all of Windows’ deadweight bloat programs, but apparently straightening photos is not something people commonly use; I went through a dozen programs over two hours to find what I was looking for (apparently most people only want to rotate their photos 90 degrees? What, they’ve never taken a crooked picture before?? Or else it’s some pro-level program that’s much too time-consuming to use). Windows’ photo editor previously handled it very smoothly, so I could easily straighten every photo, and I was looking for something like that. The program on Linux that does the same thing in the same way is called Shotwell (and then I still need to use Gwenview to resize them, so it’s the same steps as on Windows because I need to resize my photos in Windows in Paint). (If you think they’re still crooked, don’t give me a hard time about it, some of these angles were hard to judge. >.> )

THAT ASIDE, here’s my new favourite Dutch city. Nearly 100 pictures of it.

The following three days were the highlight of my trip! I’ve got a separate post for each day because I took so many pictures on these days. Ever since I found out mosasaurs were named for the Meuse/Maas River, and definitely since Tharash gave me a mosasaur tooth for Christmas, I wanted to go see Mosasaur Central – I mean Maastricht. Continue reading →