Á Francophone Canada

Today we made our way across the border into Quebec and onward to Montreal.  On our drive today we took a circuitous route, checking out Lachine on our way.  It had a lovely river front walk and some neat shops.  Including an antique shop that we stumbled onto that had been closed up for years and just reopened.  Claustrophobic piles of all types of stuff piled up ten to fifteen feet on either side of a very narrow walkway that had been cleared.  We could only see a small potion of the stuff, but pretty cool and a nice collection of gramophones for K to peruse. Afterward we drove through Chambly in an attempt to visit the Unibroue Brewery, sadly we arrived to discover they were renovating and not taking visitors  :-(

Lachine waterfront.

Ironically, as we were headed to Montreal, so was team USA . . . their next match was there in three days.  At the time when we bought our WC tickets we knew there was a chance that the USA would be in the Ottawa Quarterfinal if they won their group, but it was really going out on a limb to project further than that, so we didn’t look into tickets for the Semifinal match.  At this point we’re thinking that may have been a mistake (esp. as was J planning to fly and the rest of us heading to Quebec City the day before the SF match), mais c’est la vie.  At the very least we can be in Montreal for the festivities leading up to the match and soak in the general splendor . . . and perhaps exploit social media to find out where the team might be.  And in that vane, we have identified the three practice fields used by the World Cup teams in the area.  As we headed into town we decided it would be worthwhile to check a couple out.  We struck out, but did grab a nice cup of Joe at Timmy’s in the process.

Finally making it into the city, and into our hotel.  We headed out to see a bit of the town, find a place to eat, and ultimately a place to watch the Canada vs England match.  Again we chose well, finding a good pub-ish place where we ordered beer by the 4 L tank (multiple times) and sadly watched Canada come up short in their match.  Being the Americans in the bar, we naturally were the ones to start a bar-wide round of applause for Canada’s valiant effort in this World Cup . . . the liters of beer probably helped us along.