Our Summer Cruise 2016

 

Monday, June 20

Today was a quiet day. Jan and Bob left around mid-morning to join up with Stephen and Fran and they will be making their way slowly towards Quebec City over the next week while we remain at La Ronde waiting for news on a replacement hull for our dinghy that has developed a crack.

The hot weather has broken and we were in the high 50s this morning with a high in the low 60s forecast.

We both worked on cleaning the boat - gets very dirty near the big towns/cities - and it looks quite good. Had a relaxing day after that with a few other boat jobs, some reading and working on the blog.

It was a busy day at la Ronde now that school is ended for the summer and the lines were long. The park has two big roller coasters (Goliath and la Monstre) in our view and from opening to closing they are very busy with distant screams from the teenage girls as they plunge downwards. It has now just become "white noise" to us.

La Ronde was originally built as an attraction for Expo 67 and was run by the City of Montreal until 2001 when they sold it to Six Flags, a US theme park chain. It kept its French name. The park has 40 rides, including ten roller coasters; among them is Le Monstre, a 131 ft high wooden double-tracked roller coaster, which holds the record for highest double-tracked roller coaster in the world. Goliath, a steel roller coaster, is equipped with the first-ever virtual reality headsets so although you are in clear sky for most of the ride, they can change the surrounding environment - one minute you can be flying through jungle, the next through space.

 

Tuesday, June 21

We are settled in here for a while and have negotiated a good rate at the marina and they were even good enough to refund our original three days and start the rate from when we arrived.

We also got our Opus Cards for use on the Metro and and buses. That enables us to add to the card as we need and gives us a better rate. We are now on the weekly unlimited plan for less than US$20 each. When you consider each ride is $3, it doesn't take long to be ahead. The Metro is an excellent system built in 1965 for the Expo. It is similar to systems in other big cities and covers most of the central Montreal area so that you are never a long walk to a station. The trains seem to run every six to ten minutes and hold a strict schedule; are well maintained and clean; and have been very convenient. The Metro system ties in with the commuter train lines and the bus system so one could be car-less in Montreal with no real problem. Kids under 11 ride free during school vacations as well. In addition, there are bicycle racks everywhere; bikes can be rented for a nominal fee and then dropped off at your destination. Sunday they are free!

Metro Map

Any way it was our normal walk, bus, train,walk to get to our destination for the day - The Montreal Botanical Gardens. On our way, we passed the site of the Montreal Olympics held in 1976. Unlike many of the Olympic sites, Montreal seems to have made great use of them with over 180 days of use last year. A new reports show that almost $200 million needs to be spent mainly on a new roof system. This summer, in July, the Quebec Summer Games will be hosted here.

Olympic Stadium

The Gardens comprise nearly 190 acres of thematic gardens and greenhouses and work was begun in 1932 during the Great Depression was a Works Project. In 2008 it was named a National Historic Site of Canada as it is considered to be one of the most important botanical gardens in the world due to the extent of its collections and facilities. The site include both Chinese and Japanese Gardens; the former was undergoing major renovations but should be open later this summer. There are an extensive set of greenhouse with varying micro-climates from high desert to tropical rainforest (good on a cool day!)

These are just a few of the photos we took during our visit.

 

Lettuce

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"One of the Top 5 Alpine Gardens in the World"

 

One of the Many Penjing (or penjai) in The Garden's Collection

Penjing are similar to Japanese bonsai but they pre-date bonsai

by six hundred years

Wednesday, June 22

Woke to a dull day and some light rain but it's meant to clear later in the end of the day.

Did. not have a big day planned, so headed out to do some grocery shopping. To keep things varied and see a bit more of Montreal, we surfaced from the Metro at Berri UQAM on the way to check it out. We go through here and change trains at least twice every day. Berri UQAM is the location of the University of Quebec at Montreal and the area was quite run down with not a lot to offer so we hopped back on the Metro to head to Atwater where there is a huge indoor Mall and a giant IGA we had seen before. They were building the stage and setting up for a big concert Thursday night before Quebec Day. I needed a few items, so we checked out the three storey Canadian Tire and had a light breakfast and coffee at a cafe before loading up with shopping at the IGA - best supermarket in Canada to date!

Just made it back to the boat when the downpour came - would not have been a good walk from the bus stop ten minutes earlier.

Rest of the day was quiet, catching up with the blog and reading although we did watch "A Walk in the Woods," based on the Bill Bryson book of the same name, with Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson - quite a funny movie.

Thursday, June 23

A quiet day again and caught up on the blog, washed the boat down well and dried it off for the rain to come within an hour and give it a second wash. (Works without fail). Cleaned the inside of the boat and caught up with a bit of news.

Friday, June 24

Woke to a very nice Quebec Day or Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, officially known in Quebec as La fête nationale. It is a holiday celebrated annually on June 24, the feast day of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. In Quebec, it is a public holiday with festivities occurring on June 23 and 24 which are publicly financed. June 24 is also celebrated as a festival of French Canadian culture in other Canadian provinces.

The tradition landed in Canada with the first French colonists. The first mention of celebrations of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in North America dates back to 1606, when settlers en route to the future Acadia rested on the coast of Newfoundland, June 23. The second mention of celebrations, occurred on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River on the evening of June 23, 1636, with a bonfire and five cannon shots. 

Over time, the festival lost importance, but in 1834, a journalist named Ludger Duvernay was inspired by Montreal’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and decided to create a similar event for French Canadians. Duvernay established the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste in 1843, an organization that aimed to promote St-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations. In 1880, the society organized the first Congrès national des Canadiens français, set to coincide with regular festivities. A song composed by Calixa Lavallée and Adolphe-Basile Routhier was performed at the convention for the very first time. This song was “O Canada,” which would become Canada’s national anthem a century later. In 1908, Saint Jean Baptiste was named the patron saint of French-speaking Canadians. In 1925, St-Jean-Baptiste Day became a provincial holiday in Quebec. During the Quiet Revolution, the event took a political turn, with many riots and protests taking place.

Today, La fête nationale, has lost much of its religious significance but special church services are still held.

We were out early to get breakfast at one of our favorite cafes, Muru Crepes on rue Bon Secours near the church, before heading along rue Notre Dame and then to rue St. Catherine for the big Parade to celebrate La fête nationale in Montreal. As with most parades, they were a little late getting started and the large crowd kept growing so it wasn't unusual.

Crowd Gathering at St. James

By standards, the Parade was a bit of an anticlimax as it was not much better than the July 4 Parade in Kalamazoo. If not for the support of Hydro Quebec, the parade would have been very light. The best part of the Parade was the large Falun Gong Marching Band - one of only two bands in the whole Parade.

Another highlight of the Parade was a large group of young men and women dancing in traditional dress.

 

The crowd enjoyed the Parade and the great weather to accompany it.

We took a circuitous route back wandering through some areas we had not seen before including Place Victoria that looks to be like any other open area space in a high rise area.

It is home to part of one of the largest "underground" cities in the world that includes 32 km worth of tunnels over twelve square kilometers of the most densely populated part of Montreal. In total, there are more than 120 exterior access points to the network, not including the sixty or so Métro stations located outside the official limits of the "city", some of which have their own smaller tunnel networks. One can truly live in Montreal without ever going out in the open with all type of shops, educational institutions, businesses and entertainment accessible underground.

Just a short way off, we could see a large dome above the buildings that looked interesting so we headed in that direction and found the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde or Cathedral of Mary, Queen of the World, the third largest church in Quebec which is the seat of the of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Montreal. The building is 333 ft in length, 150 ft in width, and a maximum height of 252 ft at the cupola, the diameter of which is 75 ft.

The church was built between 1875 and 1894 under the control of the second Archbishop of Montreal to replace an earlier cathedral, Sainte-Jaques that burnt down in 1852 and is a scale model of St. Peter's in the Vatican City, albeit without much of the internal embellishment. It does have a Bernini style ciborium under the dome that was sculpted in Italy.

Rather than having the statues of the twelve apostles on the façade of St. Peter's, the front of the cathedral is topped by statues of the patron saints of 13 parishes of Montreal. Quite a lovely building!

 

We weren't done for the day yet as, at the Place d'Armes, there was a free Baroque Choral Music concert to publicize the Montreal Baroque Music Festival running the following week. Loaded up with a couple of lattes, we enjoyed an hour of music sitting on a shady bench in the Place before heading back to the Champs De Mer Metro where we saw an example of what public pressure can do - the saving of the tower of St. Saveur which would have been totally demolished to build the new mega-hospital in the downtown area.

 

 

Saturday, June 25

A scorching day is forecast with temperatures in the low 90s again, better than rain and cool. With the A/C running on the boat to give us a good environment to return to, we left to go to Mont Royal and other places on the way.

The Metro dropped us at Sherbrook and we found the first stop for the day, a small park, Square St. Louis, in the Plateau Mont Royal area. The heavily treed square is home to some beautiful Victorian homes, many painted in bright colors. The park has many shady areas to sit with a very old kiosk/cafe serving light food so we enjoyed a latte each while overlooking at a very nice fountain in the center. This is definitely not on the tourist beat and there were some odd characters in the park.

 

Very French Feeling Here

Some more of the Plateau Mont Royal homes.

 

 

 

Many of the homes feature various forms of stairs to the main entrance as you can see.

From the residential area, we found the main street running through the area which ran for a good mile with an eclectic mix of boutiques, cafes, restaurants convenience stores, etc. The place was hopping with people everywhere - busier than anywhere to date. The place to be by the looks of it. Some interesting street art as well

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A long walk later in the beating sun we were at Parc du Mont-Royal. The Parc is centered on Mont Royal named by Jacques Cartier, guided there in 1535 by the people of the village of Hochelega. He named it in honour of his patron, Francis I of France, he was a smart man!

The mountain is the deep extension of a vastly eroded ancient volcanic complex, which was probably active about 125 million years ago and was created when the North American Plate moved westward over the New England hotspot.

The Parc is the largest greenspace in Montreal and a very popular location both in the summer and winter. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also co-designed New York's Central Park, and inaugurated in 1876, although not built completely to his design for various reasons.

At the western edge of the Parc, we came across the Sir George Etienne Cartier Monument created by sculptor George William Hill and was inaugurated on September 6, 1919. An important politician of the 19th century, Sir George was a Premier of Canada East and is considered to be one of the Fathers of Confederation along with John A. McDonald. The monument includes bronze figures representing the nine provinces making up Canada at the time, four bronze lions at the corners, Sir George and the Angel of Renown at the top of the 100 ft column.

"Canada Must be a Land of Liberty and All Freedoms - Sir GEC"

We bailed on the 4.5 km hike up the mountain in the heat and instead took the No. 11 bus through the Parc almost to the summit and found a good overlook of Montreal as you can see below. The best place to get a good overview of Montreal. You can clearly see the Olympic Stadium and the area of our marina to the right.

View From Mont-Royal

A ride further on the No. 11 bus took us down from the peak past the artificial lake of the Parc and the Cemetery of Notre Dame to the end of the line in a wooded residential area where we made the return journey to Plateau Mont-Royal and the metro home. A very hot but worthwhile day!

Sunday, June 26

Birthday Girl!! Judy has reached one of those milestones like 13, 16, and 21 years of age. I will not say how old except to say she can now get a lot of good discounts. Thank you to all those who sent birthday cards, emails, and Facebook wishes on Judy's special day.

As if we haven't seen enough of Montreal, we took off early into Montreal before most people were up - the subway was quiet, like deserted.

The Birthday Girl!!

First on our to do list was breakfast of lattes and chocolatinas at Pan D'Ore, the bakery we found a week ago - as good as last time, before we arrived at the Montreal Musee de Beaux-Artes again. Today was their monthly free day for everything, except the two Special Exhibits so we spent a complete day here touring most of the Galleries, only skipping a couple. We had a great day browsing from recent Inuit back to the Renaissance art. We particularly enjoyed the large scale Modern Art exhibits with the likes of Jim Dine and an exhibit about Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr, Jr. called "Partners in Design" that spotlights a crucial, though little-known, aspect of the development of American modern design: the collaboration between Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first curator of architecture. The exhibition focusses on the contribution of these two visionaries and friends who spread the ideas of the Bauhaus and acquainted North America with modern design and architecture by means of pioneering exhibitions that they organized at MoMA, such as Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932) and Machine Art (1934).

The exhibition traces the development of modern design from Bauhaus up to the influential MoMA exhibitions of the 1930s. It brings together archival documents and videos and over seventy design objects – furniture, textiles, and industrial design products – including twenty-one from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, held today by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and some Bauhaus and New Bauhaus pieces on loan from MoMA.

I took way too many photos or works of interest but have set them up on a separate page if you are interested in looking at what we saw. Click Here for Images