Our Canadian Road Trip: Montréal

Montréal is all about breaking stereotypes. The stereotype about Canadians with nice manners? Montréalers eagerly prove that wrong. Stereotypes that Canadians are courteous drivers? Montréalers will run you straight off the street to put that perception to rest. Now, we don't mean to generalize, but we come from a city of horrible drivers. With as bad as Louisville traffic is, Montréal takes the cake.

We stayed in a small apartment (read: basement) in Rue Radisson during our visit. Every apartment in this city looks exactly the same. It was a nice, clean apartment with two twin beds and a kitchen so we were able to cook some food. We spent the night to rest and enjoyed the free wifi this apartment provided to explore the places we wanted to visit.

We actually planned to go to the Jardin Botanique de Montréal until we found out that the ticket was $20.50 CAD per person. We know, we know, we're cheapskates but Montreal was the 4th destination on our road trip and we couldn't risk spending too much money too early because we were so far away from home. But if you could afford it, we think you should do it because the park is so beautiful. As a result, we went to St. Joseph's Oratory in the morning instead. 

St. Joseph's Oratory is a Roman Catholic minor basilica in Montreal. Without trying to sound so ignorant, we saw so many people climbing the steps on their knees while praying. We later found out that the devoted followers will do the 99 steps on their knees as a gesture to share the pain of Jesus Christ's suffering. The total steps to the church entrance is 283 steps. It was a breathtaking scenery when you get to the top of the step. 

Both visitors, religious and secular will enjoy the architecture of this oratory. 

Driving around the town after visiting St. Joseph's Oratory, we decided to spend few minutes to visit Lachine Canal. There's nothing really interesting about this place, and there's not much to explore.

We read about the Le Plateau neighborhood so we decided to take an opportunity to check it out. Navigating the Montréal traffic was certainly a challenge and it took us about an hour to find the colorful instagrammable Victorian townhouses. It's not easy to find a parking lot so one of us had to stay in the car with the engine running and the other one taking pictures.

We went to the Redpath Museum because we thought it was free. Upon making our way to the area, we discovered we would have had to park at McGill University where it was a $20 CAD parking fee. Seeing as we were doing our best to ration our money, we elected to move on and instead went to the Floralies Garden in Parc Jean-Drapeau.

It took us driving around the place twice to find the entrance to the park with a 30 km/h driving speed limit, so you can imagine how long it took. It was kind of a disappointment because it looked like an abandoned, forgotten, quiet park in downtown Montreal.

We decided to stay no more than an hour just to relax.

The last place we visited the following day before leaving Montréal was Parc du Mont-Royal. We always dedicated one full/half day to visit a huge park. Parc du Mont-Royal is the deep extension of a vastly eroded ancient volcanic complex, which was probably active about 125 million years ago. As a result, the tourist guidebook Michelin Guide to Montreal states that it is an extinct volcano.

It was really easy to climb up to the top from the parking lot, but if you want to explore the park, there's a staircase to go down from the lookout. It's always easy to go down, but hard to climb up back although we think it was worth it.