Parlais vous Anglais?

Day 12 - August 8th

Another bright sunny morning in Vermont. We had breakfast at the Trapp Lodge (American sized portions again... seriously, who eats 4 thick, plate-sized pancakes?) and a walk round the beautiful gardens then back in the car for the next leg of our journey, into Canada. At this point all the speed limits switch to km/h, all the road signs go French and the number of roundabouts goes up noticeably (we saw a few around Boston and Vermont, but not many). Also, our sat-nav only does the USA so we had to resort to manual-nav. Despite these new challenges and some road closures due to Traveux (roadworks) we found the hotel in Montreal without too much trouble.

Our initial impression of the city wasn't great - the first thing we saw upon leaving the car park was someone sitting in a boarded up doorway making a crack-pipe out of a coke can, nice. The next hassle was getting some Canadian cash - we hunted round a nearby shopping area for minutes before eventually finding an ATM which didn't take Visa cards, the next two machines we found were out of order and the fourth finally worked, but only with one of my two Visa cards and would only let us take a maximum of $100 (about £65) which is a bit of a pain when the machines charges $3 per transaction. We then walked to the Old Montreal district (the main tourist hotspot), this was only 3 blocks from our hotel but on the way we encountered more graffiti, litter and people sleeping rough than we had during several days in Boston and New York.

Old Montreal and the harbour front were significantly nicer but still had an air of being out-and-out tourist traps and lacked any real atmosphere. Still, tourists is what we are - so we did about the most touristy thing we could and booked onto a dinner cruise. By the time we'd been back to the hotel to change it had started raining heavily and we feared the cruise curse might have struck again. Luckily, unlike Acadia it wasn't foggy or windy so the cruise went ahead - and actually, during a rainstorm, being in what is effectively a glass bubble was probably the best place we could have been, the views weren't bad at all (the same couldn't be said for the walk back to the hotel - the tramps seem to have multiplied and spread even into the tourist areas, and of course they were more drunk).