July 25 - Montreal, Canada

We wanted to take a Grayline bus tour to get an overview of the city, so that we could go back and concentrate on the areas we liked most.  As it turned out, Grayline runs a pick-up bus to the various motels, ours included, so we decided to leave the bikes at the motel and take the bus into the city.

The Grayline tour worked out great.  It was a three-hour tour without getting off the bus for more than 15 minutes, so was quite inclusive.  The driver we had was sort of the ideal guy for this tour, in that he had been a  teacher, had a good delivery, and a good sense of humor.  When he taught, his specialty was French, so he knew the French history of the city and region as well as the correct pronunciation of all of the building, park, and people's names.  As it turned out, all of the people on the bus could understand English, even though the first language of some was French, some Spanish, and some Portuguese.  So he was able to give the commentary in English, while being able to relate to the languages of the other people also.

The tour covered some 200 Montreal items, supposedly, and was very comprehensive.  We went to the top of Mount Royal, a mountain in the center of the city, to an extremely large church (St. Joseph's Oratory - has a dome under which 3,000 people can be seated), to the Olympic complex as used today, past innumerable statues, interesting areas or neighborhoods, and many, many more city highlights.  Excellent tour.

Then we walked about 10 miles, or so it seemed, including the Old Montreal and Old Port, which are being restored and made into a tourist area.  The architecture of most of the old buildings was very interesting, and we found that in some parts, remodeling a building to a modern one still required that the front facade had to be maintained in its original form.  One building we saw had all of the walls and floors torn down to be rebuilt, but the front facade was held up by a specially made steel frame until the rest of the new building could be built around it.

 The Old Port had also been largely refurbished, and contained marinas for small boats as well as shops and eating places.  All in all, fun to visit.

We also went down into Montreal's "Lower City" (they used to call it the "Underground").  It is amazing how much of the city has another whole floor down under all of the buildings, whole blocks of them, that contain every kind of shop and restaurant you can imagine.  It is like blocks of malls underground.  This also forms part of the winter pedestrian traffic routes from building to building and block to block.  All in all, amazing!

Last but not least, Norm found a man from Toronto, whose hobby is restoring old tractors.  You would have thought Norm had gone to hog heaven, since he also has an old tractor he is restoring, and he knows every tractor ever built, with year, model, and specifications.  They had a good time chewing the rag about tractors.

Next we will be off to ride to Toronto tomorrow.

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