No one has ever said traveling with a 3-month-old is easy. And even though Elle is likely in the top 5% of “easy babies,” the pure exhaustion we both felt when we woke up this morning was real. Thankfully, we were able to take it slow this morning. We ordered room service for breakfast and took Elle’s 3-month photos in her very cute Ralph Lauren outfit. We didn’t leave our hotel room until nearly 11 AM when we made the 15-minute walk to The Citadelle of Québec. 

What a difference 12 hours makes. When we arrived late last night at Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, it was pouring rain, but when we opened the blinds in our room overlooking the rest of the castle, it was a beautiful sunny morning. After getting Elle ready and having a room-service breakfast, we were prepared to go out and explore.

The one day of the trip we were worried about was today. The weather called for a lot of rain, and we were planning to make the 3-hour drive from Montreal to Quebec City. We took it easy in the morning, I went for a run first thing while Jenn fed and cared for Elle. It was just starting to rain on my run so I had to cut it short and grabbed a coffee at Melk before meeting Jenn back in our room and having room service breakfast. 

A little less than a year ago, Jenn came home from San Francisco saying she was pregnant. After a topsy-turvy 9-months, we welcomed Elle into the world on May 31st. We are ready to test the waters three months later with our first trip as a trio. We decided to take a road trip to Montreal and Quebec City for our first adventure. We packed the night prior, were down at the car a little before 8 AM, dropped off Frasier at Camp Canine, and began our journey north. 

When we found out the fantastic news that Jenn was pregnant in the fall of 2023 one of the areas of our lives that we knew would change in the short term was travel. As of this writing, we’ve visited 43 countries and averaged three personal international trips a year. With that in mind, we spent many dinners, weekends, and walks with Frasier early on in the pregnancy talking about where we wanted to go before our daughter arrived. And then the pregnancy began in earnest and we had to survive the first trimester and get through the holidays. That left us the start of 2024 to go out and travel and a very limited window to do it. We landed upon mixing two work trips and going back to some of our favorite places in the world.

After any good trip, you will hear both Jenn and I say, “We should travel more.” It to me is the sign of a good vacation and since COVID we have started to ramp up our travel both with work and on our own. After we arrived home from Seoul we were deep in planning mode for where we wanted to go next. We had toyed around with going somewhere after my July work trip, but our schedules didn’t align. We thought about going to Cancun to finish off our goal to see the 7 wonders of the world, but it was far more money than we wanted to spend to go to Cancun. What we landed on given our limited availability was taking a road trip to Portland, Maine.