Montreal and Quebec City June 2012

An eight day road trip by Eileen, Madeline and Tim.  We took our new (used) ’06 Honda Accord.  Nice road car, strong, fast (thank the manual transmission for over the top acceleration), quiet.  Great AC.  Got an occasional 35mpg on 75mph highway runs.

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Accord-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We drove over the UP, entered Canada at Sault Ste. Marie, and embarked on Canada Hwy 17 towards Montreal. Made it to sleepy Blind River the first night, right on the shore of Lake Michigan.  It’s a bonus to be able to pull up right next to the door.

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Hwy 17 is a beautiful road, nice scenery, excellent pavement.   The speed limit is 100Kph, or 62mph. We saw enough police that we didn’t push it too far.  One has to drive through numerous small towns, so average speeds are low.  It took us most of the day to make 550 miles to Montreal.  We saw the occasional touring bicycle and hundreds of Harleys.

In Montreal, we stayed in a college student’s 1br apartment, in the old part of town.  Eileen found this place through AirB&B.  The place was decent, in a nondescript building.  We immediately found this older section Montreal to be charming, old world, different than anything we’re used to back home.  The side streets were uniformly very narrow, one way, and redolant with trees.  And parked cars.  Every 4-5 blocks, a main street with commerce, shops, bars, and restaurants would emerge and head off in either direction for a mile or two.  The look was clean and inviting, there were no garish signs, very few chain style stores.  We felt totally safe, knowing that the chances of armed robbery had fallen to  .00001% the moment we crossed the border.  Since the weather was so warm, crowds thronged every sidewalk and eatery.  And, we may as well be blunt here – everyone speaks French.  Who could have known?  And yet, we never met a person who not ready and able to speak fluent English gracefully.  All Quebec’ers learn English as a 2nd language, and we heard that the other provinces return the favor with French.   Click the link below for a few snapshots of street scenes.

 

Housing was dense, and followed a certain pattern.  There were virtually no single family homes.  The basic construct was a two flat, or three flat, side by side with the next, walls touching.  The ground floors offered their own door.  Second levels were mostly reached by an outside, wrought iron staircase, often curving.  Third floors were reached by climbing the outside stairs to the 2nd floor, then entering the building for another set of stairs inside.

There were plenty of exceptions to this style, apartment buildings mostly, but for block after block, mile after mile, this was what we saw.  Being down in the thick of things came at a certain price – small housing units in close proximity to neighbors, hard to get parking, lots of stairs to climb.  Montreal has a serious winter climate, and we marveled at how folks navigated these treacherous stairs in snow and rain.

A word about Canadian stairs.  They are steep!  Inside or out, they don’t follow any kind of American building code for limits on the width or height of a step.  Mostly they felt like climbing a ladder.  Over three days, we saw almost no overweight people and attributed this amazing fact to the stairs and to the swarms of bicycles.

 

Biking – where do I start?  We’ve never seen so much bike traffic.  It’s the perfect place for it – very dense, but flat, everything within reachable distance.  Montreal basically invented the bike sharing program that has been adopted in notorious bicycling European cities and is now making inroads in Madison, Boulder, and other American cities.  On our first day, a Sunday, everyone was in party mode and going about their serious business of fun.  Maybe half the riders we saw were using Bixi bikes, the official bike sharing bike.  No one wore bike clothes of any kind, or helmets.   The Bixi system features over 300 kiosks, and 5,000 bikes.  We eventually rented a few bikes for the grand cost of $7/24 hours/bike.  The $7 is what you pay if you “follow the rules”, and the rules say you must check out a bike, and return it to any kiosk, within 30 minutes.  You pay a penalty for the 30-60 minute gap, and an even bigger one for 60-90 minutes.  Lord help you if you just don’t return the bike. You’ll be out at least $250.  You must use a credit card to start the process.  You swipe the card and the kiosk gives you a “code” which is good for only a few minutes. You approach any bike, punch in the code, yank the bike out of its dock, and you are good to go.  The time limit seemed bizarre and unusable to us at first, but it’s really not so bad in that you can’t go a block without seeing another kiosk.  Once you check you bike back in, you have a two minute “cooling off” period, then you can pull another bike (or the same one) out again and you’re good for another 30 minutes. You repeat the process: swipe your card, get a code, punch it in.  The whole scheme is designed to keep these bikes in circulation and not have them hoarded, and it works.

On a working day, we did see kiosks with no bikes.  If you depend on one to get to work (and clearly many did) it could be a mild drag.  You’d have to walk to other kiosks and hope for better luck.  Also, we saw kiosks that were completely full, presenting yet another problem for someone trying to beat the 30 minute limit to check back in.

Most streets were rideable, many had bike stripes.  And a few were main thoroughfares, with a double lane.  One of those went right by our place.  Bikers streamed by day and night.

On a Monday morning, the bike scene changed a bit from Sunday.  We saw a much higher percentage of non-Bixi bikes and more usage of helmets and bicycle clothing.  And more riders!  Along the main bike routes, it was nothing for 50 bikes to pile up at a red light.  This went on for an hour and a half.  Madison thinks they are “bike friendly”?  It’s time to get real.  Madison is a poseur, if you consider things like % of riders going to work.  Montreal has them beat by an order of magnitude.

We drove (! – what a mistake !) down to the water’s edge to see the Old Old Town. Parking was nonexistant.  We should have taken a Bixi bike, but were having problems with the kiosks at this early point in our assimilation.  The old waterfront blends and intermixes with modern buildings.

At some point we walked Rue Ste-Catherine, a long street closed off to traffic, festooned with purple beads overhead.  Much to see, lots of eateries.

McGill is large, world renowned university of 35,000 students in the heart of downtown Montreal. Madeline being 16, we signed up for an official tour.  These following pictures are random scenes around campus.  All classes at McGill are conducted in English, and the student body has maybe 7-8% Americans. It’s an old campus, so Very Old Buildings are intermixed with modern skyscrapers.

After a few days of Montreal, up the river we went, 150 miles, to Quebec City. Eileen had lined up another AirB&B, with the loquacious host and owner Giles Prince, a militant Francophile and civil rights advocate.  We received quite the history lesson regarding American and British atrocities against the French, going back 250 years.  (It seems like yesterday!).  Our unit was new, the windows didn’t open, and the first night it must have been 90F in there.  Giles brought us fans and rigged a few windows and it improved.

The Old Walled City was quite the scene, despite being the tourist mecca that it is.  It’s a fairly large area, with the eateries and tourist shops concentrating on a few streets.  We could walk there in 10 minutes from our AirB&B.  Some modern buildings were nestled in with the really old stuff, a mistake that I’m sure many wish could be undone.

The Hotel Frontenac dominated the landscape.  Our favorite thing to do was walk around the outside of the walled city on boardwalks.  Many stairs, it was a workout.

We rode the ferry across the river to Levi, just to do it.

So that was it.  We commenced to  hightailing it back to the USA and cheaper gas.  Crossed the border at 1,000 Islands, in upper NY.  Headed to Niagara Falls. Managed to get there just before dark, went to the falls to see what we could see.  A lot, it turns out.  The falls a lit up at night with powerful floods from the Canadian side.

The layout of the falls in convoluted, so this group of photos includes some overheads, scrapped from Bing maps, that helps orient a person.

We came back the next morning to see the Falls in the day, take a few pictures, before driving home.  Made it all the way to Madison before dark, some 700 miles.  Got lucky going through Chicago on a Sunday evening.  All our roads were wide open, and for a good hour, the other side was bumper to bumper.  Go figure.

 

 

 

 

Ft. DeSoto March 2012

Our second Spring Vacation trip to Ft. Desoto, with the Cadillac MI crew.  This time was different.  Madeline brought along her best friend Elise. I drove my new Tundra down alone with the pop-up, so that Eileen, Madeline, and Elise could fly and get some more days out of this vacation.

Other than that, the whole deal went down much like our first trip.  Hot weather, clear skies (with one major exception), great beaches.  Lots of bike riding, and lots of loafing.

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Here’s some pics of our camp:

 

There was an antique car show up in Tierra Verde, the nearest “civilization” coming out of the park.  I couldn’t resist snapping a few:

 

Eileen and I rode the original western section of the Pinellas Bike Trail.   It starts in the general south central part of the Pinellas penninsula and heads north, through a bunch of small town, on the way to Clearwater and beyond.  You have to drive to the starting point from Ft. DeSoto, there is no clean way to pedal to it.  We made it to Clearwater this day.  Had breakfast for lunch at a great greasy spoon, a locally owned joint whose name I won’t recall.  Big portions , cheap prices, strong A/C.

 

We took Madeline and Elise to downtown St. Petes to check it out, on a very hot afternoon that wasn’t worth much else. St. Petersburg has a nice vibe, a bit of an edge. There’s  counterculture, a welcome change in ultraconservative gun-totting Florida.

 

North Beach was where we hung out.  Bob and the other fishermen went up as far north as they could go to get into the channel where they’d previously caught fish.  It’s so cute how fishermen are superstitious.  Nonetheless, its didn’t work.  They caught no fish.

 

Bob brought two yaks down, a feature which contributed nicely to his “Grapes of Wrath” traveling style. Eileen and I borrowed them one day for a very pleasant circumnavigation of the island. Bob’s poor coefficient of drag was our gain.

Back to Bob’s rig.  Was it the two boats?  The four bikes?  The three large adults, with a big guitar?  Whatever.  His Toyota blew a seal on the way home and leaked more oil onto the highway than the Exxon Valdez.  They bought oil by the tankerful.  I heard they just kept the hood open, tied Debi to the front bumper, and had her pour oil continuously into the crankcase while they desperately strove for the next town with a Toyota mechanic.  It all worked out, especially since they got to spend a  lovely, unscheduled evening in Dothen, AL.

Phoenix/Sedona

E&T hit the road for a winter break. We had to burn two tix from Allegiant Air or lose them. They fly straight from Rockford to Mesa Airport.  It figures that the first snow storm of the year hammered us on the way down.  Grim driving, grim flying.  Flight delayed by several hours, but with some serious de-icing it took off just fine.  We made it to the Holiday Inn Suites Mesa by 1:30 the next morning.  (Nice room, giant bed, huge pool, no one in it. Too cool for the natives.)

Up bright and early, great breakfast within walking distance of our Hotel. Then we motored over to Tempe to walk around.  Man, is it dry in Phoenix!  Total desert (8.5″ of rain per year.)  Quite a shock coming from Wisconsin. Temps in the high 60’s, air quality amazingly clear. I’m quite sure that’s not a given.  Downtown Tempe is compact and typical for a large college. The campus is vast, with a student population we heard is in excess of 50,000.

We were entranced by the light rail that cut through town.  Very modern.  We unfortunately had no occasion to ride one.

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In the afternoon we hiked a nearby city park named Papago.  Two miles and no irrigation away, the dryness is dramatic compared to being “in town”. We baked in the sun and stoked up on Vitamin D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the hike, we motored around.  Walked downtown Scottsdale, drank wine on an outdoor patio.  Still great temps, fancy surroundings.  We need another million in our portfolio to fit in there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finished the evening with Mexican dinner at Mangos, in downtown Mesa.  There is a real downtown, it was full of people (regular folks), street musicians, not too upscale.  Mangos was a popular locals hangout, very basic, above average food.

The next day, we took our tennis rackets back to campus, hit on the ASU courts.  Took a picture of our rental car, a Hyundai Elantra.  Nice machine, fast, 40mpg.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the afternoon we found The Bicycle Cellar, a bike rental place near ASU campus in Tempe.  Good rental bikes, rode a local bike path and met Jim & Monica, snowbirds from Minneapolis.  We rode about 5 miles with them chatting away about their RV life in Mesa, which they love.  They’ve been coming here for seven years.  They have a 5th wheel and spend 5 months down here in Monte Vista RV park.  Monte Vista has 10 championship level tennis courts, leagues, workout facilities, pool, etc.  We did check out a couple of RV parks in Tempe and Scottsdale and got some rental info.

Ate at Jalisco’s, a very authentic (ie, no one there spoke English) Mex joint with good tacos and rellenos.

On Sunday we met up with old friend Barb McNichol, from Colorado – now residing in Tucson.  In two hours we could barely catch up, so we drove over to the fancy resort hotel The Phoenician to walk the grounds.  They managed there to have both the best cactus garden around, and to also abuse the usage of water, all at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday morning we drove the 130 miles north to Sedona.  For those who aren’t familiar, Sedona is located in a huge, high desert plain dotted with some of the most spectacular rock formations imaginable. And not just a few.  They seem to go on forever.

We checked in at the ranger station south of town for hiking maps and suggestions, and the camera started clicking.

Our Motel was the Bell Rock Resort in Oak Creek Village, about 6 miles south of central Sedona.  Nice place with pool and hot tub, good bed.  We hiked the Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte loop that same afternoon, just a mile from our motel, gorgeous hike on a cloudy day. A storm had blown through and fast moving clouds were still in evidence. As opposed to crystal blue skies, these clouds made for some interesting photography.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then on to Uptown Sedona, a six mile drive.  Spectacular rock formations flew at us on the way.  In desperation I started taking photos out the car window. We had a drink overlooking the canyon, best view in the city.  Walked nearby to a restaurant for a really good Kobe burger.

Sedona is parts pure tourist destination, but it also has some “real” neighborhoods, and real shopping areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Tuesday we hit the road, drove SW 17 miles to Cottonwood, a real town, not a tourist destination. As we dropped in altitude from Sedona, the topology quickly changed from semi-verdent high desert to real, bone dry stuff. We checked out an RV site and saw the same Airstream from the day before, in the ranger station. Then five miles onward to Jerome, a former mining town and tourist crossroads that sits perched thousands of feet above Cottonwood on a ledge.

Jerome was way up there.  You could see for a hundred miles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Sedona and an afternoon hike, this one north and west of town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last day.  We drove Cottonwood Canyon to Flagstaff.  Very scenic.  Dramatic gain in altitude.  Stopped at the highest point to look down into a steep canyon.  Parking lot sale of traditional Indian jewelry.

UA-Flagstaff reeked of hipster chic.  It was too bad we didn’t have time to stick around, and besides, it was *cold* there.

We skedaddled back to Sedona for one last hike in warm weather.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago Dec 2012

Eileen, Tim, and Madeline went to Chicago, just to do it apparently.  We drove around, stayed in Hinsdale, visited old haunts in Downers Grove, ate out, hit the Field Museum.

(Click each picture for more of the same.)

Bahia Temple

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Downers Grove and Hinsdale train stations

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Randall Park Tennis Courts.  This was the epicenter of tennis action in Downers in the 60’s.

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Tivoli movie theatre in Downers.  We rented this white house when we moved up from Louisville. The Tivoli movie theatre was directly across the street.  I think it cost me $0.35 to get in.  A box of jaw breakers was a nickel.

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Field Museum

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Mancation 2011

Mancation hit the road for it’s fourth installment.  This year featured a never before seen 7th member, Tim’s nephew and bad-assed rock rider Jeremy. Another change for this year was the addition of a 4th day.  Everyone could get away on Thursday.

The regular crew:  Tim, Mike, Wes, Doug, Scott, Guy.

We hit the road later in the year than usual, an Oct 13 Thursday getaway.  The weather was terrible, it rained hard all the way up north. And yet, when we floated a five mile section of the Flambeau, just north of Park Falls, the rain relented and while it was a tad gloomy, everything went fine. There are no photos of this event.  From there we rolled to our cabin via Hwy 77.

We once again stayed at our small cabin on Lost Land Lake. It’s hard to pass up the Hayward area, with its proximity to CAMBA (Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association) and it’s 300 miles of trails.  Being so late in the year, the scene was much different than the warm glow of autumn, resplendent with trees in full color.  Every leaf was down on the ground this year.  The temps were colder.  The wind howled.

First night’s repast was Mexican by Chef Hankard, who also mixed up some high quality, natural ingredient, completely deadly margs for the group.   The margs were concentrated enough for one senior member of the group to take the next day off, nurse his sore ribs, and go shopping.

Friday breakfast featured Jeremy’s Outstanding omelettes.  Rave reviews by all.

Friday’s ride was reportedly tough, with the wet, downed leaves causing visibility problems and slippage.

Friday dinner was out. We kayaked over to the Lost Land Lake Lodge, had a boatload of fish, watched St. Louis take it to the Brewers in what was becoming a familiar beatdown. Paddled home in the dark, heavy winds, threat of rain, no incidents.

Saturday’s weather improved.  Sunny, very cool, very windy. Saturday breakfast was by Tim, who dished up his version of huevos.  Spicing options were “mildly hot”, “smoking hot”, or as one person put it, “Asian hot”.  A few weenies went with “mild”.  Tim was very, very disappointed in them.  No one went Asian.  Otherwise it went down well with the crowd.

Saturday’s ride was not as hard as Friday’s, and the weather was much better.  Sunny, cool, windy but no problem with that in the trees. The best part was that the leaves had dried out. The crowd breathed a sigh of relief when a “certain delicate person” finished without crashing, bleeding, or requiring a stretcher. Kudos to Jeremy for flashing Wallstreet without a second thought.

Here’s pictures of the cabin and some from the ride.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday dinner was some awesome wheat free pasta and killer sauce.  Who did that?  Wes?  Great salad.  Our own organic farmer Scott made every meal better with the addition of fresh and varied produce.  Saturday night was the only calm night, perfect for late lake kayaking and sitting around the fire.  Or sleeping around the fire in an ice encrusted sleeping bag, as Scott would have it.

We all noticed that Scott doesn’t seem to need a coat.  What’s with that?

Sunday breakfast by Scott, an explosion of vegetables in a potato dish, eggs, bacon.  Delicious.

We broke camp and headed home, stopping for a five mile float on the Namekagon.  Clear weather, again very windy.  This section of the Nam is very scenic, and there was plenty of water.  Pictures from the float:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rejected pics here:

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Post trip assessment:

1) We need to get our butts up there a week or two earlier

2) It is hard to ride on wet leaves

3) We need a bigger cabin