Fun on the way to Montreal

Well, it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting in a rather squashed hotel room banging my head on the bunk above me.  When we decided to come to Montreal for the weekend it was to be the cheapest way possible - we're experiencing "camping" in a hotel.  I spent two days planning and preparing food and packing so that we had everything we needed.  We even brought a chilli bin full of food which is just as well as the hotel room ended up not having a fridge but I'll start at the beginning.

We (kids and me) left home at 3.15pm on Friday afternoon and were due to pick up Andy at work at 3.30.  Unfortunately, he was held up so we left his work about 4pm.  Because of this, we got stuck on the express highway in 4.30 traffic going 20kms per hour.  We laughed about this and thought it was OK.

The GPS said 200km on the same road - very long and very straight.

After we finally got moving we were humming along quite nicely until we decided to stop for dinner.  A little touch of the GPS and the cable broke which meant that we were driving blind.  We laughed and decided to take the next turnoff to look for a store to buy a new one.  So we turned off the highway into a small town called Colbourg which didn't have any computer stores and in fact, by 6pm on a Friday night all the shops were closed.

We stopped and had a Wellington style picnic with the warm wind blowing so hard we had to hold everything down including the plates and even the lettuce.  We laughed lots because we felt like home.

We got back in the car and drove on, finally finding a Best Buy close to the highway so we stopped and bought a new cable.  So the next drama was soon to come, Andy stood on the back of my boot and broke the heel.  Of course these were the only shoes I had brought with me for the weekend.  We laughed so hard we cried and were now able to continue on our journey.

It started to rain and then pour and by this time it was dark.  We stopped in Cornwall for petrol as I was told that petrol is more expensive in Quebec and that's the last stop in Ontario.

We finally arrived at the hotel at 11pm after driving around the block a couple of times.  We checked in only to find that the room was nothing like the picture on the website, two single beds with two bunks squeezed into a tiny space.  Poor Andy had to go downstairs to the ice machine to re-fill the chilli bin (true camping style) and now he's gone to find some glue for my shoe.

Today we are planning on visiting Old Montreal as we've been told it's beautiful there.  First impressions of Montreal - it's weird seeing everything in French, you can't turn right on a red light like you can in Ontario, it's just like any other big city.

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