Vagabonds Montréal

the view in daylight

It never fails. I always forget to pack at least one very important, must have item. In this trip’s case, I forgot the cord which runs from my camera to the computer AND my phone charger. When did tech shit become such an indispensable aspect?

I did however remember to pack my meds and enough socks, underwear for the four days. So um…could be worse.

Jen and I got into Montreal at a little after nine in the morning yesterday. That’s WAY too fuckin’ early to check into a hotel, right? Not necessarily. We stopped by, just to see, and WHAMMO, Hotel Zero1 had a room ready right then. And such a sweet one! It’s a corner berth with three, count ‘em, three big windows, a kitchen area which’s bigger and better equipped than the one in my first Boston apartment, hipster-y lighting fixtures and there was easy to find and ignite closed captioning on the TV. That’s not common on most hotel TVs. Honest. Usually the closed caption feature is unobtrusive to the point that it’d take a degree in engineering from MIT to figure out how to bring it up.

the view after dark

OK, no, we didn’t come all this way just to watch the telly. Please. After a full day of hoofin’ it all over creation and back, sometimes the bestest thing going is turning on the tube and watching house reno shows or Law and Order (at least until we can find Buffy or Firefly repeats).

It also glows lavender and full indigo

Oh, oopsie, those captions are in French and apart from a few bon mots and expressions, I totes don’t know French. Merde. No biggy, there didn’t seem to be any Joss Whedon shows on anyway.

The first and only other time I’ve visited Montreal comes to mind. A friend and I were winter camping in upstate New Hampshire. Yes, I was not only doing the tent/no indoor plumbing thing, I was doing it in January! What was I thinking?! We decided to take advantage of the fact that we were just a couple hour drive from Montreal (oooo, a foreign city!). 

We hadn’t any plans or ideas about what we’d do when we got there. This was all spur of the moment-y and, of course, pre-Google.  What’d we do? We caught a matinee of The Empire Strikes Back. Yup, dubbed into French. Not knowing the language wasn’t a big deal really since the flick’s all comic book, action oriented. I think the movie house choice, versus luncheon at a nice, warm restaurant, was our bargain basement way of getting off the very cold streets.

Afterwards we drove back south to northern New England for more of that wretched winter camping. //shudder// Why had this concept ever appealed to me? Had I just read Call of the Wild and romanticized the shit out of frozen flavored roughing it? Yeah, probably.

In any case, here Jen and I are, eons later. Today we’ll hit a couple of art museums, poke around some more, find a pleasant little bistro for lunch and do more of that unwinding crap.