Montreal #3

I am catching up a couple days later so I’m having trouble remembering. But I think we got up and headed into town by around 10, and rented bikes at Ca Roule, which is a trendy little bike place across from the Lachine canal. This was an even better bike experience than the first time. Montreal biking is totally awesome. More lock watching also.

Lachine Canal Bike Path, Downtown Montreal in Background

After that we headed up to Lasalle for whitewater rafting. After listening to their safety lecture, I had EXTREME misgivings about this, but it turned out to be extremely fun… three days later, everyone voted it the most fun thing of the trip so far. The Lachine rapids that they take you down are actually very short, but intimidating enough to whitewater neophytes like us. We might try to swing by on our way back thru Montreal in a few days.

It turns out our whitewater guide was named Matt and has an uncle in Deep Cove who coaches soccer. His name is vaguely familiar. Small world 😉

Whitewater rafting; Lasalle, Quebec

Finally, around 6 PM, we dropped off the car (with great difficulty thanks for the abjectly inaccurate maps handed out by Thrifty; I now HATE Thrifty for making us drive all over Montreal looking for non-existent dropoff locations), stopped in Drummondville (about halfway) for Subway, then finally arrived at QC after dark. This KOA is much, much busier and bigger and has a TON of “bus sized” RV’s that we speculate people live in for the summer.

I should mention, it seems as you get further East, there is less and less English. About half the tourist material in QC is French-only, and the rest is often stilted bilingual (never English only). Sometimes one sees highway signs and wonders if it is saying anything important. In the Drummondville subway, nobody there had a clue what we were saying, other than words like “tomato” and “onion” are similar enough to prevent a sandwich disaster. Walking around QC and Montreal, I’d guesstimate 19 out of 20 conversations you overhear are French only.

Why are there signs as you go into QC that appear to announce your arrival into the “national capital”? Am I reading this wrong? Are they referring to 400 years ago, or something?