Montreal Expos

Can I enjoy the faux Expos?

/ Greg / 2 Comments

While I’m always up for a baseball game, when I visited Washington this past summer, it was with some mixed emotions of heading to five Nationals games. You see, when my Expos were taken away from me, they were in essence handed to Washington to become their new team. And while time can erase a lot, I’m never sure of where I stand on this baseball team that now claims franchise records of the team I used to cheer for. Putting that all aside, I bought some tickets, and shortly after arriving in DC, I threw on my trusty Montreal Expos hat and headed for Nationals Park.

Just through the gate, I bumped into this guy, who gave me a presidential welcome for my first Nationals game.

Mascot at Nationals game

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Guys weekend in Montreal

/ Greg / Leave a comment

The idea for a guys weekend in Montreal with my dad started with a desire to relive some old times in the city. Aside from family road trips to visit my mom and dad’s relatives in New Brunswick, my first real travel experiences were with dad visiting Montreal to take in Expos games in the early 1980s. Those trips were fun times and the memories of them still float around in my mind from time to time. The excited feelings I had when I first arrived in Montreal as a child on the train on those trips are pretty much the same feelings I have today when I visit a place for the first time.

So with nostalgia sparking the idea, and a couple of Blue Jays preseason games in Montreal this past March forming the cornerstone of a trip, I invited my dad on a guys weekend in a city we both love. I flew in from Saskatoon, him from Halifax, and we met in the Montreal airport ready to relive some good old times and to see what kind of trouble we could get into. Trouble is all relative of course, and 40-somthing me and 70-something dad were both up for some unhealthy but delicious eating. First order of business was a smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s.

At Schwartz's Deli

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What might someday be

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Note: I’ve transcribed something I wrote in a notebook last year on August 12th in Minneapolis during a trip I took to watch some baseball games. Re-reading it, I like it, so I’m offering it to the world here. It’s about baseball. It’s about the Montreal Expos. It’s about what my baseball trip in the summer of 2016 got me thinking about. As I head to Montreal with my Dad to take in some preseason baseball, this is also about what I hope will happen one day.

August 12, 2016 – Minneapolis, MN USA

Two games and a rainout later, I can’t shake the feeling of what might be. A smallish downtown ballpark, a small market almost contracted into oblivion like what threatened my Expos. A northern city. A second sport city. It’s striking really. In between innings here, if I squint just enough and let my mind wander, I can almost imagine the same scene in Montreal.

I came to Minneapolis, in part, because of early days visits to Montreal. The thrill of the event in the Big O left an imprint on me. Growing up, baseball was everything. Ask me Al Oliver’s stats from 1983 and I can quote them to you. Between early life fanaticism, then growling older and wiser, baseball was always floating around in my mind. It’s something my dad and I have in common, and I love it for that alone.

Then 1994 happened. I was in college and studying hard, had a girlfriend, and an Expos season for the ages stopped. Bitter, my focus left baseball for a while. The Expos were terrible for a long stretch. But still, every time in Montreal I would head to a game or two, and that feeling would return. Even as I was disengaging from baseball, every time I was back in the Big O, beer in hand, there was something magical dancing inside me.

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The trip I most want to take

/ Greg / 3 Comments

This weekend, Montreal is playing host to a couple of preseason baseball games and more than 90,000 people will show up to watch. They’ll do that not because they’re fans of meaningless Blue Jays exhibition games, but because going to a baseball game in that city means something deeper to them.  Although I won’t be there for the games this weekend, I count myself in that group.

The trip I most want to take is to travel to Montreal with my Dad to see the first home opener of our resurrected and beloved Expos.   My Dad is turning 76 this year and although there’s renewed interest in Montreal as a possible site for a team, it’s still a long, long way off, if it ever happens at all. So at this point, it’s a bit of a fantasy trip, but the optimist in me holds out hope of living it someday.

My first experiences of traveling were back in the early 1980s when Dad took me to see some Expos games a couple of summers in a row. We had a lot of fun in the city getting away with things Mom would never have allowed at home: eating deep fried food, having ice cream for breakfast, chasing pigeons in city parks (I was only 8 at the time and I had never seen so many pigeons in one place before), Dad partaking in an afternoon beer and passing his bottle of Budweiser beer to me to hold while he took a picture of me.  To this day the smell of a Bud takes me back to that very moment.   Good times.  But most of all from those trips, I remember the baseball. I remember the bright lights and the event of it all.

At my first Expos game

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Nordiques everywhere

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I fell in love with Quebec City in my teenage years.  Summer vacations spent roaming the streets of Vieux-Quebec will do that to an impressionable youngster.  At that time,  I was also in love with the Quebec Nordiques.  They were truly mine; I didn’t know another Nords fan in my junior high or high school.  My hockey heart was first broken by their escape to Denver then completely destroyed by them winning a Stanley Cup in their first year away.

Although the team left the city, it’s clear the memories remain.  Fast forward almost twenty years, and there it was in all its glory throughout the streets of Quebec in so many shop windows – the big “N” and hockey stick logo and that most appealing shade of blue:


If that weren’t enough to re-ignite my passion for Quebec City, I saw this in a shop.  Maybe when you lose your favourite sports teams you’re more sensitive to this kind of thing.  It made me smile, recalling the time before two of my three teams departed me:

Nordiques and Expos