Montreal

Here is my tale of woe. After what seemed to be endless miles through Ontario, we finally made it to Montreal. The idea of what we had hoped would be a miniature Paris, had kept my hopes alive over the past few days of driving. After navigating the highways to the center of the city, I was dismayed by the overly-hip, bright, commercialized, crazy busy streets reminiscent of photos that I had seen of Tokyo, that we drove through as we searched for the tourist information center that would hopefully provide us with a map to find the old part of town. After parking, we snagged a map and headed on foot to what we hoped would be old-school French streets with bakeries, cafés, and bistros. When we got there, it turns out that they took this beautiful old French corridor and turned it into a tourist trap, complete with stores where we could buy moccasins, moose trinkets, or maple leaf junk with Canada written on it. Ugh. We had hoped to sit in a bistro and eat delicious food, but the restaurants were all garbage tourist food restaurants with hosts outside brandishing menus theatrically begging you to come in. We were weakened by hunger and knew the boys wouldn't be able to make it to another part of the city. We walked around in despair, desperately hoping to find a decent restaurant open, until we knew we could go no more. Aaron, my flip-flop wearing, peak-bagging boy was dragging his feet and kept slumping down to the sidewalk so we knew we had to suck it up, get it over with, and eat. We did not sink so low as to go into one of the restaurants with the hosts trying to sucker us in, but it was still the most expensive bad dinner we have had. 

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