Olympic Stadium

Echoes of the past

/ Greg / Leave a comment

It has been a year since I lost both my mom and dad in a span of 20 days. I think, like a lot of people, I underestimated the effect grief would have on me. After the difficult process of cleaning out and selling their house all while trying to stay engaged with work from New Brunswick, I was exhausted. In hindsight, I should have taken some time off to recover, but the first break I gave myself was a short trip to Montreal to get away from everything and unplug.

I wasn’t thoughtful about choosing Montreal. I had decided on Vancouver for an escape, but the hotels were so expensive that I ended up booking my trip to this city that has been so much a part of my life over the years. I was so tired in organizing all of this that it didn’t even occur to me that I’d be away for what would have been my dad’s 85th birthday. More on that in a bit. But I was “with it” enough to book a seat on the left side of the plane for this view. Olympic Stadium on the final approach brought a tear to my eye.

Flying over Olympic Stadium in Montreal
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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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Memories of Montreal

/ Greg / 1 Comment

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.

Square Dorchester

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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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