QUEBEC, CANADA
MONTREAL
August 13 - 19
We left New York State from Hwy 87 and crossed into Quebec, Canada onto Hwy 15 after a LONG wait at the border. We should have gotten an earlier start as we were arriving a little after 3:00 PM. It ended up taking over an hour to cross. The border guard looked about 12 years-old and appeared eager to do a good job, asking us every question at least twice and making me dig through the Saturn for our registration.
Our cell service had failed to cooperate (as usual) so we had been unable to phone ahead for reservations. However, Len had planned extensively and created a list of parks – each numbered according to his preference. We stopped as soon as we crossed the border, changed some American money into Canadian and tried to use a pay phone to call one of the camps. The call (to a location about 40 miles away) cost over $4.00 and we ended up getting an answering machine!
We decided to simply drive to one of the campgrounds. We struggled to put an address into the GPS and headed towards Montreal. I decided to try the cell phone, using the +1 the T-Mobile operator had directed me to use from New York. It worked!! I was able to make a reservation and get good directions. Now that we were IN Canada our phones were working great…too bad they were costing us a mint to make a single phone call!
On Friday the 14th we did very little…walked, biked around the area and I was so happy to have internet service! I caught up on my emails and put four entries onto the Good Sam journal. It was a beautiful, relaxing day. Seaweed and I took a walk in the early evening and got yelled at in French by a grumpy old man who thought Seaweed was going to “potty” on his flowers! I tried to explain that he was only smelling the flowers and would NEVER potty outside of his litter box…he’d be mortified by the very idea! The old mad didn’t care so we made our way home in disgrace.
I probably should have said that this RV park was huge and that more than half of its spaces are permanent summer trailers with little plots of land. At the time Seaweed and I were smelling the flowers I didn’t even know that they belonged to an individual person…our bad! Once I realized that most of the landscaping was private Seaweed and I stuck to the public areas exclusively.
On Saturday the 15th Len and I took the Gray Line Bus tour of Montreal. We visited Old Montreal, the Notre-Dame Basilica, Olympic Park, Mount Royal Park and the St. Joseph’s Oratory. The tour guide was good, he did make some pretty lame jokes…but he knew his stuff. It was a hot, busy Saturday in Montreal…the streets were PACKED with people shopping and hanging out.
After the tour Len and I decided to walk up the street to the underground mall, hoping it would be cool and less crowded than the streets. The van that had picked us up from our campground wouldn’t be bringing us back until 4:00 and the tour ended at about 1:00, so we had time to kill. Most of you know that Len and I aren’t much for shopping, so the underground mall (with streets of shops going in about 6 different directions) was a little overwhelming. I bought my friend Joey a birthday card at a Hallmark shop and we walked around for a few more minutes but once you’ve seen one mall, you’ve seen them all…this was just MORE of the same stuff we’ve seen in a hundred places, so we left the underground.
But now we were back on the hot, BUSY sidewalk and had no idea of where to go or what to do. We were both having anxiety attacks over the sheer number of people and the size of all the buildings…we haven’t been spending time in big cities and this was just overpowering!! We decided we didn’t want to get too far from the place the van would pick us up, so we headed up an adjacent street looking for a restaurant.
We passed a few really busy, noisy ones and settled on a quiet, mostly deserted Mexican restaurant - Mayan…really. This was probably Montreal’s idea of what a Mexican restaurant should look like…a ruined temple with fake stone facades and vines hanging all around with fake monkeys and birds. It looked like a scene out of Laura Croft: Tomb Raider!! The food wasn’t too bad however, just on the bland side.
After lunch Len got directions to a square nearby where we could sit and people-watch. This is always fascinating in a large city…so many different types of people all congregating in the same location. We watched a few teens with skateboards smoking a joint and basically daring someone to question them. We saw people in motorcycle leather, a young man with 8” spikes in his hair and a family dressed in their Sunday best. We sat on concrete benches – carefully perched around the various bird droppings and watched those same birds dive-bombing the area and leaving droppings all around, but especially on the head of the statue of King Edward VII.
 A "Poopy" King Edward VII |
Over the next couple of days we visited the Insectarium, the Biodome and the Montreal Museum of Archeology and History where we saw a great exhibit entitled: “Pirates, Privateers and Freebooters.” The entrance fees to each of these places ranges from $8.00 to $10.00 and the parking costs are insane in downtown Montreal ($18.00 to park across the street from the archeology museum!). We lucked out with the Insectarium and Biodome however, as we visited on Sunday the 16th which just happened to be “Montreal Family Day” so both of these attractions and the Gardens were free!
I took dozens of pictures and recommend all three of these activities. While in the Insectarium I saw a variety of amazing moth-like creatures that started me thinking - the myths about fairies must be based on sightings of these same insects!
 A "fairie" bug |
 Angry Monkey at the Biodome |
We stayed in Montreal through August 18th then headed for New Brunswick. We didn’t take the time to stop in Quebec City (Montreal was enough of city-life for awhile!), although a missed turn on the freeway did give us about a 30 minute tour while driving the motor home and dragging the car…a harrowing experience!
