We did quite a lot on our last couple of days in Montreal from a beer festival to hot air ballooning (Marc-O's birthday present) and Cirque du Soleil. That was (a lot of) money well spent! We've also been trying to find a silly geocache from a cemetery next to our hosts' place, but whenever we started looking for it, the canadians needed to bury someone. No caches found from Canada and the one we hid is still being reviewed. More failures: we have forgotten to take the 404 photos (photos taken at 16:04 every day) for 3 days now. And yesterday we took the metro to the wrong direction for at least 3 times because for some reason Montreal is upside down in Marc-O's head (and we aren't even in Australia yet!!). These are minor problems though and in general everything's going better than well :)

Nikol and Jeff kindly took us to the airport this morning, and we said bye to them after spending more than a week at their pretty home. Thanks again guys, it was a pleasure! And then off to fill the different cards for entering the US. It was quite painless in the end and we even got our now bigger bags in without any problems, so we are still flying with hand luggage only, which is good. About 10 people have looked at my passport (it seems that most of them did it out of curiosity). People's reactions have been varying from “Lasse Viren!!” (ok ok, that was the guy at the Olympic stadium) to “Suomi! Finland! Helsinki! Do you speak German?” Well, yes I do but what does that have to do with anything? Or perhaps the guy really knows the Finnish history!

American Airlines had changed the schedule of our flight out of Montreal by almost an hour from the original and did not bother to inform us. Luckily we double-checked the night before. We do think they told Finnair though, but that Finnair failed to give us the information :P God bless internet and checkmytrip.com! So, that got sorted too and now we are about to arrive to Chicago where we will have an amazing 7 hour airport experience. Hopefully it's going to be a relaxing and productive one! All the people have been saying that Chicago's one of the worst airports ever, and I want to prove them wrong.

Exciteness! It feels great to realise that although we left one place, we will be on the way for more than 2,5 months more (unless this plane crashes just now, it's bumpy in the clouds)! The flying part is really a downside, but if the options are to do it and fly or to not to do it and not fly, the first option wins.

Update: the airport is really treating us well. We have found a check-in machine from the gate area (no need to do the security shit again), some good food, donuts for Marc-O, finally, and a place to charge the laptop. Our plane just arrived, it is supposed to be on time, and I still have salmiakki from our going-away party! Monsieur Meunier does not like the stuff so I get to eat them slowly ;)

Marc-O seems to be writing a long post. Please refer to his blog for some more detailed info.. Bye for now :)