Kings of the Road

After breakfast on Monday, we hit the road for Montreal. It was a pretty drive through the Adirondack Mountains, although we had a hard time finding a place to eat lunch. None of the little towns were open! We finally found an Irish hole-in-the-wall in Elizabethtown. There, we met a very friendly grandma who told us that the chairs in the restaurant looked just like the ones in the prison up north. She didn’t seem like she had done any hard time, but you never know. Some grandmas are crazy.
We breezed through Canadian customs–thank god. I always get nervous, even though I have nothing to hide. We made it to Montreal, and Larry was a bit frazzled by that point because he couldn’t read any of the signs. He was driving blind, relying on me to tell him where to turn. But I’m a good navigator, and we made it!
Our hotel, the Hotel St. Denis, is in the Latin Quarter, with lots of shops, bars, restaurants and vagabonds nearby. There are scruffy young kids peddling for money, or just hanging out on the corners looked despondent. And most of them have the cutest little puppies. It’s sad–I just know those puppies haven’t had their shots. Our hotel room is small and dark, but clean. It’s not luxurious, but it suits our needs just fine.
We walked around our neighborhood, stopped off in a cafe and had a Stella Artois beer, and then ate dinner at a local brewpub, where we had our first experience with poutine. It’s a Quebequoise specialty that consists of french fries, gravy and cheese curd. It tastes better than it sounds, trust me. But those curds must expand in the stomach, because we were so full after dinner that we just went back to the hotel room and crashed. The beer was good-similar to what you’d find at the Rock Bottom Brewery in the USA.
Montreal is wonderful. I’ve tried out a few French words, and I’ve been told by husband to stop being such a wuss and just TRY to speak more French. It is so cool to hear French spoken all around me, and see signs and billboards in French.

The Canadian accent is not as strange as I thought it would be. My French vocabulary, formerly hidden in the depths of my brain, is slowly making its way to the surface and I’m remembering more and more.
Alor, c’est tout…a demain!
Oh, and P.S., our hotel does not have Internet access (what were we thinking?) so that makes things a bit difficult with the blogging. We’re trying, though!