Happy New Year!

We still have quite a lot of 2014 to catch up with on the blog (we are 2 months behind!) but we thought it would be a good time to start thinking about our plans for 2015. So in no particular order here is the bucket list:

1. Find a moose in the wild. So far the closest we’ve got is some footprints in Algonquin Park. This time we’re thinking of heading deeper into the park by canoe park for a better chance of seeing one.

2. See some polar bears in the wild. As soon as we learnt about the possibility of seeing bears in Churchill we knew we had to make time for this once in a lifetime trip.

3. Marvel at the Aurora Borealis aka the Northern Lights. Hopefully we can do this on the same trip as the polar bear watching above if we time it right.

3. Go skiing. I refuse to let the fact that we are living in the relatively flat lands of Toronto stop us from getting good use out of that winter sports cover we paid for back in September!

4. Watch the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal. Due to an offer on the tickets over the holiday period this has now been booked!

5. Watch an ice hockey game. This one should be relatively easy, understanding what is going on might not be.

6. Visit Niagara Falls in the winter and hopefully capture some great pictures of the ice. It’s very rare that the falls freeze over completely but we will be off to have a look on a cold day anyway.

7. Go to a maple syrup festival in the spring to watch it being made and stuff our faces with pancakes.

8. Grab some bikes, head to the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec and cycle the P’tit Train du Nord trail. This disused railway line offers spectacular scenery and is meant to be a pretty easy ride.

9. Spot some whales on a trip from either Vancouver Island and/or Newfoundland & Labrador.

10. Check out the Georgian Bay Islands, one of Ontario’s most scenic locations.

11. Explore more of what our new home, Toronto, has to offer, including the zoo, museums and food.

12. Sail around the Thousand Islands on the hunt for some tasty salad dressing

13. Practice our French in Quebec City.

14. See Canada’s national animal, the beaver, in the wild. The closest we’ve come so far is seeing one of their dams.

And a few outside of Canada:

15. Visit our good friends Ben and Jerry in Vermont.

16. Take a trip to New York to see what it’s like in the summer as it was pretty chilly when we went visited back in 2011.

17. Go to Chicago, the gateway to America’s midwest.

18. Fly over to Hawaii to catch some rays, learn to surf and visit some volcanoes.

The list is endless and I’m sure we will add more to it as we go along and there will be things we don’t get around to doing but we plan to pack in as much as possible during our time here.

Stewart and Emma