With the ridiculous fares to anywhere in Canada from NYC, my husband and I are considering flying to Burlington (which has great fares on all airlines thanks to JetBlue) and then making the two hour drive to Montreal. I'm already in Toronto one time this summer to visit my grandparents, so the $400 flat fee for an hour long plane ride on a regional jet has me a little bit edgy!

Yes, we know it's only 6 hours total from NYC, but (1) we hate summer driving traffic and (2) we don't own a car, and the price of a rental is often prohibitively expensive--such that we are better off flying + renting from the Burlington airport.

Has anybody ever done this (never mind NYC, but elsewhere)? Is there anything interesting to see along the way to make it worthwhile? Are we being silly trying to save by doing this? Could we get around Montreal without a car if we just flew there instead? Is the drive somehow considerably more than the 2 hours mapquest advertises (i.e., lots of traffic)? We are probably only going to go for about 5 nights, so would prefer not to waste more time than necessary for the money in transit.

My other thought was to do a combo hotel/airfare package, which seems somewhat less ridiculous given the airfare -- it's only a couple of hundred more per person to get the package than just the airfare, at least on UAL, which is not our preferred carrier, but we'll take if it really is that much less expensive!