Favourite 2016 travel photos. Montreal, QC. April 2016.
L’Homme
Montreal
Montreal food favourites
I’ve spent enough time in Montreal to have a few go to food places. A trip to the city isn’t complete without a couple of staples. These are mostly things you already know about Montreal, and I’m not ashamed that my list isn’t one of under the radar places. All of these are wonderful and deserved of the attention they receive (well, maybe all except the last on my list).
First off, every trip to Montreal needs a stop for a Schwartz’s smoked meat sandwich, a dill pickle and a black cherry Cott cola. I’ve sampled some of the world’s great sandwiches and this is one of my all time favourites.
Memories of Montreal
Eleven years was far too long.
I had forgotten how much I love Montreal. It is a city with which I have a thirty five year history, going back to some of my earliest childhood memories. At worst, I’d find myself in Montreal every few years until this recent prolonged absence since the summer of 2005. Since then, I’ve been traveling a lot, but focused on seeing new places. I inadvertently left Montreal behind for more than a decade.
On my long overdue visit, I got a rare opportunity to see Montreal through fresh eyes. Eyes that have seen some of the world’s great cities – Rome, Milan, Zurich, San Fransisco, Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, Prague. Landing in Montreal a more seasoned traveler it immediately hit me – Montreal is a truly great, world class city.
It is said absence makes the heart grow fonder, and of that, I am certain. Absence also makes you reminisce. Over my four days in Montreal, I kept coming back to my memories in the city. Like in the early eighties, me as a child on my first trips with my Dad, and chasing pigeons in Square Dorchester. Standing here on a quiet morning thirty plus years later, I could almost hear my youthful laughter and the sound of pigeons taking flight en masse.
The trip I most want to take
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.
Bluenose Traveler 