CANADA
Montreal
While I was in Burlington we decided to do a day trip up to Montreal. It’s a bit less than a 2 hour drive so pretty manageable. Less so if you’ve bicycled 20 miles the first day and hiked 7 miles the second day.
I had a whole 36 hours planned out in Montreal but obviously we took it very chill. Primarily we went to hang out with some friends.
We headed up in the morning. On our way out of town we got coffee at Scout.
Crossing the border was no big deal although it did require me to carry my passport for entire 10 day trip for an 8 hour excursion. Also, sadly, they don’t stamp passports!
We were actually starving hungry so as soon as we were settled in we headed to lunch. My friend’s friend really likes L’Express which is a fancy french bistro. I got the rissotto which was fine but I tried a sample of my friend’s duck and that seems like a MUST have.
At lunch we happened to run into some friends from Toronto that my friend had originally met in Mexico! They just happened to be on a trip to Montreal at the same time as us. So they joined us for the rest of the afternoon.
We popped by a grocery store to pick up some cold drinks and went to Park la Fontaine to hang out on the grass and chat.
Parc La Fontaine is much cleaner than Golden Gate Park or even Barton Springs in Austin. But it’s basically just a pond with some grass and trees. I’m sorry! I guess it showed up in “things to do in Montreal” lists so often I thought there’d be a bit more to it.
It was still a nice place to hang out for an hour or so.
A notable plus to Montreal versus San Francisco is that the park had public and clean bathrooms that we could use. Additionally we were in walking distance to a transit station to ride the metro to our next destination.
Our party split up though where the other couple took city bikes since the city is so flat and bikeable. Definitely makes getting around easier as a tourist.
I cannot remember the name of the neighborhood or how to google it but we basically went to some “cool vibes” neighborhood to get some touristy stuff in.
We got bagels at Fairmont Bagel but we got bamboozled by the credit card minimum and ended up buying 2 dozen bagels before we could realize how bad of an idea that was. I ended up bringing nearly all of them with me to New York and eating quite a few stale bagels. I don’t even like this type of bagel, it was too dense and soda-y for my tastes.
From there we kinda just ambled around and popped into one or two thrift stores before settling down for a drink at Nili. They have food too but we just had cocktails and they were really good! I would recommend. Also this place had a neat atmosphere and we got free postcards.
From there we took the metro back to our car and saw the sunset over Montreal on our way.
I think I’ll need to come back someday and dedicate more time to getting to know this city!