Bon jour Montreal

I didn't know what to expect in Montreal. With the minimal planning we had done on each city we were kind of winging it all! Nevertheless we arrived in the early morning, after a sleepless and very uncomfortable 4.5 hour red eye flight! We navigated our way in public transport to our hostel where we crashed, filled up on coffee and breakfast and then hit the streets to explore!

Montreal is in Quebec which is a very French-Canadian province. It kind of felt like we were in Europe sometimes with everyone speaking French, big wide clean streets and lots of beautiful old architecture! 

We spent a day exploring the beautiful cobblestone streets of Old Town and the many churches and historians buildings found down there! The Notre Dam church was pretty cool and had some beautiful stained glass windows, sculptures and a huge organ with 7000 pipes! (This of course led to you tube searches of organs and learning how to play them ... Which we still do not fully understand!) we also wandered down to the old port where we were sad to find all the coffee shops were closed! Our frown was turned upside down when we found a cute little hip coffee shop for lunch where we had some amazing salad and the best coffees we had had in a long time!  Then it was off to the pub for an afternoon beverage while we watched the sun go down, rested our legs and planned our next day - the bike ride!

There were a few things on the outskirts of town we wanted to check out and knew the easiest way to cram them in was on peddle power! About half an hour into our ride though Rhys got a flat and luckily we had spare tubes in our cute little bum bags on the front of our bikes and had the knowledge on how to change them so we didn't had to call and wait for the 'emergency bus' from the bike rental place to come help us! It was a little tougher than we would have liked but got ourselves back on the road..with slightly dirty hands! Our first stop on our bike tour was the old Olympic park. Montreal had hosted the Olympics back in 1976 and were a still selling merchandise from the games..

There was a lot of construction going on in the area and although there were some cool buildings and stadiums over there everything was pretty old and worn out .. we weren't keen to pay te $35 to go up the lift to te observatory to look out over city so after cycling around the nearby park and botanic gardens we were back on the road to Mount Royal, a mountain (hill) to the north of the town.

The cycle pathways on the road were really well developed so we didn't have the same fear of riding on te road that we had had in Vancouver! The cycle way was its own separated 2 lane pathway down the side of the road and was separated from the cars by a little concrete barrier. It went sidewalk, bike path, concrete barrier, car parking then car traffic!! Something Brisbane should definately invest in! 

After navigating our way up to the top of Mount Royal the clouds had decided to close in and our view of the city was somewhat limited. It was well worth it though as we were still able to get a pretty good view of the city! We got a bit lost on the way down the mountain as we decided to go a different way down, but after finding our way and turning the map up the right way we found our way down to the canal and the local food markets where we stopped to look at the giant pumpkins on sale already for Halloween! 

We then crossed the water and over to (the islands) where we rode around the formula one race track (with all the pro cyclists on their road bikes), past 'habitat 67' (a block of unusual units designed by a 21 yr old architect for the 67 expo and still sought after real estate), to the biosphere (another structure from the 67 expo which had been turned into an environmental museum) and up to a castle before heading back across the busy bridges to return our bikes! 

We chilled out that afternoon with a wine at a little jazz bar listening to some local live jazz

The next day our feet were sore and our legs needed a rest so we took it easy and visited the architecture museum and the art gallery. There was an awesome exhibition at the gallery by chilhuly who made these really cool pieces with blown glass. It was all so colourful and there were so many different shapes, from flowers to boats, to reeds, mushrooms, octopus and chandeliers! We even saw our first Picasso! 

We were impressed with Montreal, we managed to find decent coffees (something we hadn't been able to do in a long time) and had had fun exploring the older city and marvelling over the architecture! It was even fun speaking a little bit of French! 

Our last hoorah in Vancouver

We left whistler excited for our next adventure, excited to be heading home and happy; knowing we had had a great summer, a real winter and had sucessfully achieved the reason why we came to whistler in the first place; learning to have a life outside of work!

Our first stop was vancouver; we were meeting my aunt j9, uncle Paul and cousin charley and I was really looking forward to catching up with some family.

We went down to van the day before they arrived so we could spend the morning doing the grouse grid; the last hike on our bucket list! The hike was a 3km climb up a lot of stairs an approx 850m elevation gain, up to the heart of Vancouver's ski hill. The grind attracts a lot of keen locals chasing after their daily exercise and there was definately a lot of fit looking people running past us on the track! You aren't allowed to walk down the trail either as it is so steep..or at least they tell you that so you pay the $10 to take the gondola down to the parking lot! Clever marketing!!

Back in Vancouver we caught up with the weary Baxter carpenter travellers who were coming to the end of their epic 3 months world tour! They had spent some time over in Europe and the US and had some pretty incredible stories including seeing part of the America's cup in Sam Fran! ..the part when the kiwis looked like they had a chance of winning!! 

We only had 1 day in Vancouver together so we rented out some bikes and hit the pavement in an attempt to see as much as possible. We rode around the sea wall around Stanley park and had a break in Yale Town for some brunch! Rhys scared us all my misplacing his wallet..only to discover it in one of the many pockets in his backpack! After our refuelling stop we continued over to Granville island and then through the city streets to Gas Town to see the steam clock! Riding through the city streets was a little scary but we made it and then waited about 10 minutes for the clock to go off! After almost 5 hours of solid riding we returned the bikes and headed back to the hotel to relax and recover! 

 

We had decided on Japanese that night so in the recommendation of the hotel concierge headed to an all you can eat Korean and Japanese BBQ! I am dangerous at an all you can eat event as I feel I have to get my monies worth and order as much as possible! Unfortunately you have to pay for the extra food if u don't eat it so this usually means stuffing ourselves a little too much! It was pretty damn good though and a good end to a short, but sweet time sort with some family! 

The next day we had the cruisiest of all mornings and saw j9 and co off to the airport where they were headed to Hawaii for a week of paradise! 

We had a few more hours to kill before we had to lug ourselves to the airport so headed over to vancouvers latest attraction; the fly over Canada. A '30 minute ' simulated flight over Canada..it was pretty awesome but broken into 3 sections so I don't feel like the main video went Long enough ! It was still cool to see some other parts of Canada even if they didn't tell us where they were! 

It was then back to the hotel to grab our oversized bags and the rest of our luggage before we headed to the airport, with a lot of staring on the bus and train, enroute to our next stop; Montreal