We toured Ottawa's Byward Market, which hosts one of the country's largest farmers' markets as well

I just got back from a nine-day train trip in Canada, and I had a blast! There's something about train trips that I have always loved, ever since I was a little boy riding with my grandfather on the club car to his office in New York.
There's something so relaxing about the rhythmic clickety-clack of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the train. And your time is your own. You can take a nap and catch up on your zzz's or read a book or just sit in a trance watching the countryside whizz by.
Grandpa and his fellow commuters liked to play bridge. In fact they'd take the local instead of the express so they could get in a few extra rubbers. For me it was blogging and tweeting and Facebooking about my adventures in Canada .
VIA Rail, the Canadian national rental car sales Crown Corporation in charge of passenger rail service, has just invested almost a billion dollars in upgrading service and equipment on their main corridor from Quebec to Toronto, including improvements to their WiFi service, and they invited a group of bloggers from prestigious websites like GoNOMAD to try it out.
In 2006 Via Rail was one of the first transportation services in the world to offer free WiFi to all classes of passengers, and they have put a high priority on connectivity national rental car sales on board the trains and in the stations. They recently upgraded service again, and it's the best you can get on any mode of transportation in the world.
national rental car sales We visited four great Canadian cities, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec, and that gave us plenty to blog and tweet about -- the all-night Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto, the Houses of Parliament and the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, the Lantern Festival at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, the orchards and vineyards of the Ile d'Orleans in Quebec, and lots of other cool attractions.
On the train, and in the comfortable lounges in the stations, we were able to write about our visit, share our photos with the folks back home, and catch up with email back at the office. Since we were traveling business national rental car sales class, we had excellent three-course meals with wine; the hot towels were a nice touch, too.
Rail travel has always been important in a far-flung country like Canada. The Western provinces insisted on the construction of a cross-country railroad before they agreed to join the Canadian Federation in the 1870s.
Around the turn of the century, competing railroad magnates built a series of splendid hotels like the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City and the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa to attract rail passengers to Canada, and these hotels offer atmosphere, luxury and service right out of the Gilded Age.
The historic Chateau Frontenac (now called Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac) towers above the Old City of Quebec and the Plains of Abraham, where the fate of Canada was decided in 1756 in the famous battle between the British and the French.
Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met here to discuss strategy during World War II, and it has hosted celebrities from Charles Lindberg and Grace Kelly to Charles De Gaulle and Ronald Reagan.
The Frontenac was booked up when we visited (We stayed at the equally luxurious Chateau Laurier Quebec ), but we had a lovely luncheon there with Catherine Lapierre, national rental car sales assistant director of public relations, who gave us the complete tour.
Not to be outdone, Charles Melville Hays of the rival Grand Trunk Railway began construction in 1909 of a chateau-style hotel in Ottawa, the Chateau Laurier Ottawa . It was to open on April 26, 1912 and Hays was returning from England to attend the ceremony when he perished aboard the HMS Titanic. They held a subdued ceremony a month later.
Because of its proximity to government buildings and national landmarks in the capital, and because so many important national rental car sales meetings have taken place there, the Chateau Laurier has come to be known as the third house of parliament.
I had the chance to stay there, and I have to say it really was a thrill. The grandeur of the architecture, the patina on the paneling, the exquisite antique furnishings, and, of course, the service... It was a trip back to the reign of Queen Victoria.
The first of the grand Canadian railway hotels, the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, opened in 1878 as a symbol of the nation's new prosperity and entertained the great celebrities of the day including Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt. It's an office building now. In Montreal we stayed at W , a very hip luxury hotel right on Victoria national rental car sales Square.
Our trip began in Toronto, the New York of Canada, where more than 130 languages are spoken by more than 200 ethnic groups. Half the population was born outside national rental car sales Canada. There are five Chinatowns, two Little Italies, Little India, Greektown, Koreatown, and many others.
We stayed at the Delta Chelsea , a luxury hotel specializing in family travel. They have a Family Fun Centre on the second floor with a pool, a teen center, an indoor water slide and a year-round summer camp for kids.
Toronto really rocks; you feel so much more connected to the world than you do in the US. We make a show of embracing diversity in the US, but here they re actually walking the walk. And there are so many ethnic groups that everybody is a minority.
Theresa Archibald, from All About Toronto Tours , who's originally from Chile, took us on a tour of markets and shops and funky neighborhoods national rental car sales of every possible ethnicity. We went up the CN Tower, and then went over to the huge St. Lawrence Market to have a pea-meal bacon sandwich at the Carousel Bakery, which you have to do if you visit Toronto. national rental car sales I think it's some kind of city ordinance.
We dined at a cool hotel in the Design District called The Drake where art is such a big part of the experience that they have a full-time curator. Famous and not-so-famous artists often stay there in exchange for works of art that become part of the collection.
The next day it was off to Ottawa where we toured the houses of Parliament and the famous Rideau Canal, a 123-mile waterway constructed in the 1830s so that, in the event of war with the United States, military supplies could be transported across Canada.
Thankfully, that war never came, and the canal is used for pleasure boats and, in winter, a five-mile stretch in Ottawa becomes the world's largest skating rink. Many Ottawans national rental car sales skate to and from work.
Now it's every bit the national capital with lots of grand architecture and statuary, as well as dozens of really great museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canadian War Museum, the Bytown Museum and the Royal Canadian Mint.
Ottawa is also host to the largest tulip festival in the world which began in 1945 when Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, later Queen Juliana, sent 100,000 tulips to the city to thank the people for providing her family a place of safety during World War II.
We drove by the prime minister's residence and the embassies of nations around the world. Ottawans were amused when the US embassy, known locally as Battleship America, appropriated another lane of traffic to install yet another row of concrete barriers. The US spends so much more money, but Canadians feel so much safer. How is that?
We toured Ottawa's Byward Market, which hosts one of the country's largest farmers' markets as well as a diverse collection of restaurants, cafes, shops and craftsmen, some of them hidden away in little cobblestone courtyards.
The restaurants all use fresh local foods. national rental car sales The waiter national rental car sales at the Murray Street Charcuterie where we dined was able to name the individual national rental car sales farms where their ingredients came from. By the way, be sure to try the duck poutine.
Then it was off to Montreal, where met up with Tanya Churchmuch of Montreal Tourism, who showed national rental car sales us the city's cool new BIXI bike-share system. One swipe of a credit card at any of the solar-powered nodes all over the city and you can take a bike and ride it anywhere you want and just put it back in the rack at another node. And the first hour is free!
In the evening we went to the Magic of Lanterns exhibit at the Montreal Botanical Gardens and later at the Restaurant Garde-Manger in the Old City, I had the most delicious meal I have ever eaten: tender bison steaks with an egg on top and foie gras on top of that, then scallops with bacon. national rental car sales Not hard to see what punches my ticket!
From there we took another relaxing train ride to Quebec, where we checked into the luxurious Chateau Laurier Quebec, where everything was exactement comme il faut. You know you're in French territory when you can buy a glass of wine from a vending machine by the elevators. national rental car sales We dined at Restaurant Le Pain B ni , where I had the most tender and delicious venison I have ever eaten.
Then we took a tour of the Ile d'Orleans, the 'Garden of Quebec' known for its strawberries, its maple sugar, and its apple orchards and wineries. It was like touring the French countryside. We stopped to sample cider and wine and liqueurs made from black currants.
I reconnoitred the Plains of Abraham, where the fate of Canada was decided two and a half centuries national rental car sales ago, and descended one of the staircases down the cliffs national rental car sales that have protected this strategic national rental car sales city against every assault over the centuries, except for one.
Legend has it that the British national rental car sales general who led that one successful assault in 1756, Major General James Wolfe, got the idea when he saw women climbing down to do their washing. His troops scaled the cliffs in the early morning, taking the French by surprise, and the rest is history.
But while the British did govern here for 150 odd years, take it from me, Quebec is still French and always will be. And it's great to have a piece of France right here in North America so we can go abroad without the trouble of crossing the ocean!
It's both a public and a private enterprise because besides operating routes in the busy Toronto-Quebec Corridor, Via Rail also provides an economic national rental car sales lifeline to many remote communities on routes that do not generate enough revenue to cover their direct costs.
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