Montreal

August 23, 2016

On Monday the 22nd we moved to a place called Camping Auclair about 40 minutes outside of Montreal.  I needed to do a little grocery shopping so I headed into the little town where we were staying and hit up the store.  Nobody spoke a lick of English, and my French is pretty terrible so the cashier and I had a bit of hand signal communication as she was trying to describe which cart I could use to take my groceries out to the car in.  That was fun, but we figured it out and made it out with some food.

Eric took the day off on Tuesday so that we could go into the city and explore.  We learned from our trip to Ottawa and found a park and ride station outside of the city and just rode the bus in.  We were practicing our French while waiting for the bus to come pick us up, and trying to figure out how to ask how much the total would be and if they had a family bus pass available…luckily there was a nice young lady at the bus stop who I’m sure was trying not to laugh at our terrible french who helped us out.  The bus driver spoke English as well so it was all good.

We walked A LOT that day!  We saw the Notre-Dame Basilica then slowly walked our way up to the famous Schwartz’s Deli for lunch.  We had heard that there is always a wait at this place but it is definitely worth it, so when we got there and there were only a few people ahead of us waiting for seats we were very excited.  We ordered the traditional smoked meat sandwiches for everyone and the black cherry coke that our waiter recommended to go with it.  It was so good.  Haydn even said that he liked it better than pizza and Emma who normally does not like meat very much couldn’t get enough!  We went next door for some homemade ice cream and then stopped in a candy store on the way back to the bus stop where the kids each got to make a bag of mixed (very expensive) candy.  There were really cool graffiti murals all over the city and the kids had fun finding them and taking pictures of all of the really good ones.