«Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte» or something like that (sorry Pascal). Gonna cover a little more ground in this post, but not likely the last one.
First Full Day: Stretching Our Legs
We took our time getting ready on our first whole day in Montréal, but we eventually headed out past the tiny Chinatown for a late breakfast and coffee before exploring the old city. We were in line forever, but had some decent coffee and great pastries in a unique setting at Crew Café—the public space for a co-working operation in the old Royal Bank of Canada building.
The cafe positioned us around the corner from an entrance to Montréal’s Underground City near a section of the Berlin wall! Turns out it was gifted to the city on the occasion of their 350th anniversary.
We needed our transit passes for the week and had direct access underground to the Square-Victoria-OACI station. From there we jumped up a couple of stops to Champ-du-Mars near city hall to check out more of the old city and port. The photo at the top of this post is at the start of Rue St.-Amable off of Place Jacques-Cartier. It’s a gorgeous if touristy part of town, but we wanted to return to Mont Royal for lunch at one of the city’s oldest poutine shops: La Banquise. Worth the wait, really tasty, definitely the sort of meal you have maybe only once a year for the sake of your arteries!
I briefly parted ways with my family after lunch so I could do a little solo exploration using the amazing Bixi bike share system. If my youngest had been a few years older I think we all would have ridden together, but Valerie was generous enough to let me have my bike nerd time. I alluded to the cycling infrastructure in Montréal in my prior post, but the whole city really has SO MUCH. I posted while I was there:
Richmond hosted the UCI Worlds in 2015 and our bike infrastructure is still pretty spare all these years later.Today I rode a BIXI (bike share) #bike around Montréal’s exquisite cycling infrastructure and it feels far more appropriate that they’re hosting the UCI Worlds next month.
It isn’t perfect and I’m sure locals want (and deserve) more, but I really felt safer riding around an unfamiliar city on a clunky rental bike than my own city that I ride every day as an experienced cyclist. What a treat!
Anyway, after a decent-enough dinner at an Italian restaurant near the arts district, we hit the grocery store to get some snacks for our day trip to Quebec City. And here I encountered the legendary milk-in-a-bag!
Tuesday Day Trip to Quebec City
Valerie loves an organized tour so she had us book a bus trip to Quebec City a few hours up (down? It was northeast but flowing out to sea) the St. Lawrence River. Our rest stop on the way brought us life-sized dinos in the parking lot and the realization that there are still some pay phones up there. Nice!
We initially went past the city to stop at Montmorency Falls, an absolutely gorgeous site to behold:
Once we were in the city we had a short guided tour around the lower city which Valerie enjoyed and the kids and I mostly tolerated. The self-guided exploration and climb up to the upper city (we did all the stairs up to the upper funicular platform!) was excellent, and we were all utterly charmed. We took the funicular down, because who doesn’t love a ding-dang funicular?
We returned to our hotel late and exhausted, but dang. Worth it.