Month: July 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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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.

(click for more pics).

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.