Back to my second home! I’ve always loved Montreal and it’s still the only place I’d move back to Canada for. We spent 3 nights here.
We stayed downtown at an Air BnB apartment. It had a late check in at 1630 so I risked it and arrived at 1600. It was a self check in process and I found the door open with the keys inside as promised. I also found the place in a tip. The sheets were clearly used, all the towels were piled up and there were still dishes in the sink! I grabbed the keys and sent a message to the host to let them know. In fairness they had 30 minutes before I was supposed to check in. We used that time to get some groceries. We arrived back closer to 1700 to find the cleaner at work! I thought I was well prepared for Montreal being functionally bilingual. What I didn’t prepare for was trying to speak Spanish! Luckily I took one year in high school… The poor cleaner looked surprised to see us in the apartment and worked as fast as he good. Hanika sat in the hallway with the boys while I shuttled our bags out of the van. Our babysitter arrived (we were due out for dinner) to find the kids crawling around the halls! We managed to get the kids dinner and settled before we darted off to join friends 30 minutes late!
We ate at a delicious French restaurant called “Grenadine” in the Latin Quarter. 3 of the group ordered the 6 course degustation. Much to my surprise we were all given different meals for each course! I had a mouse foie gras creme brulee, horse and a rum and sorbet pallet cleanser. Other people had rabbit and deer.
After dinner we went to Benelux which was our old regular brew pub where I worked after graduating for a few months. We had a great night going through some old and new beers and catching up.
The next day Alex hosted brunch at his place, complete with Cesars (which is a Bloody Mary with clam juice added). I seem to remember the metro to be much easier to ride when I was single and childless! The metro system is not very pram friendly, especially after using Toronto’s subway. I had originally planned to take the family to Tam Tams but time got away from us and we headed for a quick nap before dinner with family friends (I first met them in Thompson in the early 90s).
The follow day we went to the Science Museum to pick up our memberships. The exhibits were alright and kept Moose occupied but I don’t rate it as highly as the one in Ottawa. As a bonus we got free parking for being members which saved us $30! We had St Viateur bagels for lunch, a superior bagel as compared to any we’ll get in NYC! We had a classic poutine dinner at La Banquise to finish off the day. It was dreary and raining all day so that limited our time outside. I walked around McGill with Ollie but the whole campus is covered in scaffolding.
What we’ve learnt so far is that we need about twice as much time as we had planned to do things. That means we should be spending a week or so in each city. We’ve booked the next few major cities already but I think this will influence how long we spend in places after that. Also, packing is terrible! Hanika’s made it her goal to make us more efficient at short stays instead of dragging all our belongings out of the van every night.
Kids and busy days don’t lend themselves to long transits on public transport. We drove a lot more than I had planned but found parking easily enough. There’s no way the kids would have tolerated a 40 minute journey plus walk at 8pm!