Montreal road trips
We arrived in Montreal Thursday evening, to our pleasure, but the first thing that happened on Friday morning was, I fell, and sprained my ankle, hit my head, rammed my back into a sharp metal corner. There are consequences, mainly that I can barely walk. Not too terrible - we are making car tours rather than walking tours, and not hiking at all. We got a brace for my ankle, and a cane, and I spend a lot of time with my leg up. Enough of that.
Yesterday, Sunday, we decided to visit two islands in the St. Lawrence River, Ile Notre Dame and St. Helen’s Island. Both are served by bridges, and both are mainly parks. Here’s a link to Google Maps, which hopefully will bring up the places we went: https://goo.gl/maps/y2ioQFC7z48t2iV36
Ile Notre Dame, it turns out, was built from rock quarried for the Montreal Metro, and is entirely artificial. But while it’s certainly covered with roads, buildings, parking lots, etc, it doesn’t strike the eye as man-made. Trees planted in the 1980s, now grown tall, and bushes flowering just now, and grass full of dandelions, all give the feel of a natural place. It has a long rectangular basin that was built for the 1976 Olympic Games held in Montreal, and is still used by rowers and canoeists. It has a casino, that was reconfigured from the pavilions of France and Quebec. Of course, this wasn’t what we were looking for, but you get what you get.
St. Helen’s Island is equally built up with roads, bridges, parking lots and actual industrial sites. It also has some artificial parts, and indeed was combined with a few smaller islands using debris from digging the Metro. We drove around it somewhat, but the road to the wild-looking lake at the south end was closed, a meander through the woods by car was also closed. I got a little lost in a tangle of little roads, and we ended up coming over the Pont Concorde, which angles southwest from the tip of this island, to the tip of a long thin piece of land that encloses the Port of Montreal next to Old Town (see map). To our right as we headed south on this spit of land, tour boats were coming into or leaving their docks, and we could see an amusement park with a big wheel. To our left the St. Lawrence was full of whitecaps from the rapids under the surface.
Julianne was aware of an architectural marvel just here, and I was very happy to find out about it. Habitat 67, designed by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67, the Montreal World’s Fair. It was gorgeous, surrounded by flowering trees and bedding plants and obviously well cared for, though plain concrete. If you took dozens of truck-trailers, like those sometimes used now for sheds and outbuildings, but rebuilt them somehow out of concrete, and piled them up like pick-up-sticks…. maybe you get the idea. Quite original. See Wikipedia’s very interesting article. We thought it would be a grand place to live.
Habitat 67, an apartment complex, designed by Moshe Safdie.
We found our way to a restaurant in Old Town called Modavie, and had a darling lunch with jazz music. From there we realized the only thing to do was to drive up Mont Real, for which Montreal is named. Through curious local neighborhoods beset with one-way streets that led us ever off the beaten track, we found the road up the hill, taking us past a viewpoint facing northwest, around the flat top with walking paths, sports fields, parking lots, and what we thought would be the most wooded area, the very large cemetery, which occupies at least half of the mont. We drove through the cemetery marveling at its size and age. Cemeteries always quiet one’s mood, don’t they? All those women dead in childbirth, all those soldiers cut off young. Lots of mature trees, lots of understory, numerous locals maintaining their relatives’ graves. When trees die, the foresters here leave the snag, good for woodpeckers. Anyway, when we tired of that, we drove back down to the viewpoint. The day was very hazy, and we couldn’t see much except the Olympic stadium, very white against the muted landscape.
That was it for Sunday, and we drove through the downtown and over to our favorite long street, rue Notre Dame, which leads us home.
