Are you the kind of person who likes to have everything arranged well ahead of time? Do you like to know where, when, why, and how-much-will-this-cost when traveling? I am starting to see how that might be nice — particularly when traveling with children. Packing for a family is so much more involved than packing for yourself it turns out. You need clothes and toiletries and lots and lots of underwear/diapers. You need lots of games and toys for them to throw onto the floor of the car, never to be retrieved. You need snacks. You need pillows and blankets and a playpen and special snuggly blankets and the where-the-hell-is-it soother. And always, always you need a contingency plan.
This is how my entire trip to Montreal turned into a contingency plan. We originally planned on driving to Montreal for one night to attend a wedding reception (the wedding ceremony happened months ago). My in-laws generously offered to babysit for the weekend and my husband and I would travel on our own. I started to realize that I could not do that. My little Reenie is only 8 1/2 months old and I just couldn’t imagine leaving her for that long. And as long as we were taking the baby, might as well take big brother, right? So, plan B was that the in-laws would also travel to Montreal and we would share a hotel room for two nights and they would watch the children while we attended the reception. (The kids were welcome at the reception but my in-laws thought they might like the trip.) The cost of staying the extra night and the other miscellaneous expenses involved in a slightly longer trip started to cast a giant shadow over my empty bank account and I wondered if maybe we could just go for one night after all. Not to mention Ed had an important lunch meeting and Reenie a hearing test on Friday. We wouldn’t have gotten in until the middle of the night anyway, so why not plan to leave bright and early Saturday instead?
Friday night, then, I was anxiously trying to pack all of the above while Ed searched the internet for cheap-but-clean-and-nice motel/hotels in the Montreal area. Again. His parents, wisely, decided it would not be fun to drive to Montreal and back for a one-night stay. So we were on our own which was probably for the best. I then had one tiny little cup of coffee around 9pm and even though I have been regularly chugging back multiple mugs full of joe most nights since Reenie was born and then instantly falling asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, and even though I even dozed off that night for about 20 minutes when I lay down with Young C at his bedtime, that one cup somehow conspired with the pre-trip excitement to keep me awake all night. I tossed, I turned. I got up and drank some milk. Finally, about 3:30am I took a Gravel and was finally able to catch some shut eye.
So that 5am start? No, that didn’t happen. Instead we pulled out of our parking spot just after 10am and managed to clear Oshawa about two hours later. Stupid traffic. That’s when Ed first suggested stopping. I was shocked. “I really hoped to be on the road until at least one o’clock before stopping for lunch,” I told him. “We need to get to Montreal, find a hotel room, shower and change, and be at this reception by six. Seven at the latest.” That’s what I was figuring.
Ed said that he would rather miss the reception altogether and have a good time getting there, stopping whenever we wanted. That was fine by me. So we stopped at a Tim Hortons in Port Hope for lunch and then no more than half an hour later Ed said, “Oh! The Big Apple! Stop here.” This Big Apple (not to be confused with the big apple, New York City) is essentially a small building that looks like an apple right off the 401, just outside Colborne, Ontario. It has a petting zoo in the parking lot and a some apple trivia painted on the interior walls of the apple. There is also a huge cafeteria-style bakery that sells mediocre apple pies to tourists. We got a dumpling that was tasty enough, a bottle of Dole (?!) apple juice and called it a day.
We stopped once again for gas and a snack late that afternoon and then hauled it right into downtown Montreal. We parked and set out on foot for smoked meat sandwiches. Because that’s what you do, right? Schwartzes had a line up down the block, so we settled for a half-empty deli across the street. When you have kids, you don’t do line ups.
We then wandered through the pedestrian-only stretch of Rue Prince-Arthur that is lined with cafes and restaurants and through the Square St-Louis which was simply lovely on a mild summer night. We stumbled upon whole blocks of St-Denis that were closed to vehicular traffic in honour of the Just For Laughs Festival. There were elaborate stages with music and dance and comedy. There was an old-timey circus mock-up. It was wonderful, spectacular, surreal. Word to the wise, though. If you find yourself holding my baby girl in the middle of a Montreal street festival, you will be swarmed by gushing Francophones who reach out and hold her hand and pinch her cheeks and otherwise baby-fondle her. This sort of baby-groping does not get by me in Toronto, but for some reason that night in Montreal, on that street, it didn’t bother me.
We wound up driving back out toward the airport to cut our hotel cost in half and then had lunch the next day in Notre-Dame-De-Grace. We had a lovely visit with an old friend of mine (and her husband and toddler) and then drove down to Old Montreal. Strolling along the port and through the narrow, cobble-stoned streets of Old Montreal was like reaching out and touching history. It is good for the soul.
Finally, on our way out of town, we headed back up to the trendy Plateau and walked around for a bit before dinner. We changed the kids into their pajamas at the side of the road and rolled out of town 24 hours after we arrived. We I drove most of the night and pulled back into our parking spot at 3am, just as the iPod was running out of juice.
Montreal is one of those places that make you wonder why you don’t live there. We started plotting how we could manage to make a life for our pathetically Anglo-only speaking family (my 13 years of school French notwithstanding) in Montreal. In the end, we are probably better off in Toronto. But it sure is nice to have a city like Montreal down the road.