The new promenade, free museums and Westward Ho!

One Sunday morning, we took a lovely walk along the new and improved (to the tune of 50 Million - CAD, of course) promenade in the heart of Montreal. It covers a span from Mount Royal all the way down to the Old Port.  We walked a scenic portion of it, with our new friends Harry and Sophia.

This was in a part of town we had never been to before.  Crescent Street is a lively area with lots of restaurants, shops, and bars. 

Not to mention the bigger than life portrait of Leonard Cohen on the side of a very tall building.  We Montrealers do so miss our beloved Leonard Cohen!

 It was also a free museum day so we wandered into a couple of museums as well. Did not get to see the Picasso exhibit so we plan to go back and catch it later.  

On my way to the garden, I pass a grocery store called the Metro (not to be confused with the transportation metro)!  There is an ecologically minded group that builds  vegetable beds along the sidewalks and plants various veggies in the summer. Once these are ready, anybody can come along and harvest them and take whatever they can use.  This is a great community service project, similar to the neighbourhood “Food is Free” garden that I tried to plant in my front yard a few years ago (that ultimately succumbed to the Texas heat).

On Friday Dave and I took off on our big cross-Canada adventure (also lovingly referred to as our epic Canadian trip)!  The goal is to get to Airdrie (just north of Calgary) to see our friends Sandra and Rene, that we met 2 years ago on the Viking River Cruise that went from Switzerland to Amsterdam.

We will spend 3 nights with them and then 3 nights at Lake Louise in Banff, which we hear is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.  We debated about driving vs flying, bringing the cats vs not bringing the cats, etc.  We finally decided to go ahead and drive even though lots of people warned us that the prairie provinces are really boring.  

Day 1 of the trip  involved a lot of driving. It really was a total coincidence that we left Quebec the exact same day that Trump arrived.  We drove about 4 hours and then took a lunch break at a great park along the Ottawa River in Pembroke Ontario.  We spent the first night at a Walmart in Sudbury Ontario.  It was a pretty decent sized town and the Walmart backed up to a rock face that looked like it would have been a nice hike if we hadn’t been so tired.

I did manage to get this photo that could convince you I really did go climbing. In truth, I am about 5 feet off the ground. We had dinner at a local “wings” place and when I came out of the bathroom I found David deep in conversation with a fellow St. Louis Cardinals fan.  You would have thought they had known each other for years. Funny how that common bond brings people together. 

Day 2 - another long driving day but - oh my - the scenery was AMAZING! .We drove along stretches of Lake Superior where the water was so blue and the trees were so green. The sky was clear - it was a beautiful day.  We switch off driving every 2 hours so it really isn’t bad.  We were planning to get to a place called Pukaskwa National Park, but as we drove through a little town called Wawa, we decided to see if they had any camping spots there.  Ok, we just liked saying the name Wawa.  We found a campsite at the Wawa RV Resort and Campground (I love how RV places call themselves “resorts”).  Conjures up images of the Hyatt Lost Pines or some fancy place on a beach.  

Wawa has a lot of flying geese so they have several huge statues of geese around town.  We went to see some waterfalls that they have here, took a short walk downtown, stopped in at the General Store, then headed back to our campsite.  We cooked some quesadillas for dinner and are now sitting around a campfire.  It’s a wonderful 15 degrees... perfect for a fire and a light sweatshirt.  I’m glad we stopped early and took some time to do some sightseeing. This whole adventure is about seeing and experiencing our new country.