After a week in Montreal shopping, touring, catching up with friends, and standing in line at La Ronde, Jess and I hop on the first of four planes that will take us to Lake Tahoe tomorrow morning, where we'll spend the last week of our overseas holiday vacationing with my mom's side of the family.

I'm slowly posting photos of our travels on Flickr, but at this stage they're about two weeks behind us. Stay tuned.

Before our week in Montreal, there was the cottage, which was four days of lakeside bliss with long-missed friends. After the lights finally came on, everything went perfectly up until the last hour before we all left, when Chris walked through a screen door and his girlfriend Lou dropped her car keys in the lake. My best guess is that they didn't want to leave, and were doing their best to delay the inevitable.And before the cottage, there was my week at OSCON in Portland. I blogged the nitty gritties of that in detail at SitePoint, but in general it was an astonishing gathering of talent. Attendees routinely sat in sessions coding some personal project or other, or participating in the conference "back channel" on IRC. At one point during the final day, I walked into a men's room behind a fellow toting an open laptop who proceeded to stand at a urinal and continue to surf the web with the laptop in his free hand.

The whole thing had me feeling like a bit of a fraud at times. Although I do contribute to a few open source projects in my spare time, the average developer wandering the halls at OSCON was a lot closer to code in his or her day-to-day work. It was a privilege to get to meet so many of them.

For those who worry about such things, our trip from Portland to Ottawa was relatively straightforward (as the smiling faces in these photos atest). We were nearly re-routed due to one of our aircraft breaking down and being replaced by a smaller one (which would have pocketed us an easy US$200), but in the end we flew as planned, and arrived on schedule.

Hopefully our flights tomorrow will go as smoothly. Again, lots more on Jess's travel blog.