Travel Log: Seventeen — M’s Birthday Week in Montreal
We arrived in Montreal on a Friday with a rule we had made before crossing the border: no American chains. We were in Canada, we were going to eat Canadian, and that was that. We lasted until Saturday, when I really just wanted PF Chang’s, and there happened to be one north of the city in a mall in Laval. The Mongolian beef was gummy and mushy, nothing like the version at home where the beef comes out crispy and wok-cooked. M’s salmon was fine. I sat across from her moving disappointing beef around a plate I’d driven forty minutes to reach, and before we’d even paid we’d already agreed we were going to eat at a PF Chang’s the minute we got back to the States, just to get that taste out of our memory, and that was the end of the no-chains rule for the trip.
Getting to Laval meant crossing the St. Lawrence and then crossing back, which meant bridges, which meant Montreal traffic, which is its own particular experience. We also crossed an under-construction metal bridge on the way home, one lane, everyone fighting for it, the bridge itself rattling in that specific way metal bridges do. I crossed it at about 35 miles an hour, which aggravated everyone behind me, but I did not care, I kept going.
Snapshot: Week Three
- Location: Montreal, QC
- Duration: 8 days
- Miles from Quebec City: 161
- Must-see: Saint Joseph’s Oratory
- Ariel’s rating: 🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾 (the campground had a spectacular patio. She approved.)
Sunday: The Oratory
Saint Joseph’s Oratory is the kind of place you plan to spend an hour and stay for most of the day. It sits up on a hill in the city, enormous and layered, with multiple floors opening up to views that spread across all of Montreal below you. We went to mass Sunday morning and didn’t leave until the afternoon.
There’s a floor dedicated entirely to Saint Joseph, with candles and devotions to different visions of him — Saint Joseph the worker, Saint Joseph the father — and alongside those devotions, at several points throughout the space, there are racks and columns hung with crutches, walking aids, and other mobility implements that pilgrims left behind after being healed at that site, going back generations. The old ones are the ones that stop you, the kind of crutch that was made before the ones we know now, left there by someone who came asking and went home without it. It’s a lot to take in quietly.
M found a medallion of Pope Leo XIV in the gift shop — her first one for the new Pope — which she’s adding to the collection of metals and religious items she picks up at these stops to make rosaries and other pieces. The jewelry side hustle continues to expand its source material.
The oratory has a cafeteria where I tried Montreal’s smoked meat sandwich. It’s somewhere between pastrami and something chewier, on toasted bread, and it was fine. I enjoyed lunch. I would not specifically order it again.
We got back to the campground that evening to a storm rolling in, which we always love in a camper — the sound of rain on the roof is one of those things that makes RV life feel genuinely good. The leak next to the bed made it slightly less romantic. But still.
Monday: Seventeen
M turned seventeen on June first. She spent the first two hours of her birthday finishing a music composition assignment.
It was due that day, and performing arts classes at her school don’t have the same grace periods as the academic ones, so the deadline was real. The assignment was composing an original piece using music software, which is not her favorite thing. She likes to sing, she likes to put on an instrumental and go, and sitting with digital composition tools is not where she lives creatively. She did it anyway, without complaining, on her birthday, and that was done by mid-morning.
She’s seventeen now. It continues to catch me off guard.
From there, we took the metro into the city. M had a restaurant picked out, which turned out to be closed on Mondays, which is the kind of thing you learn to check before you commit to being hungry in a specific neighborhood. The neighborhood in question was lively in ways that became apparent fairly quickly — Montreal has legalized sex work, and the block we were on made that policy visible. We were two people trying to find somewhere to have birthday lunch, moving a little faster than we had planned.
We found Ragu. It’s a food hall in an unusual format — instead of the standard arrangement where restaurants line the walls and tables fill the center, here each restaurant has its own cluster of tables, sometimes with a colored tablecloth or different chairs, sometimes just a menu on a tripod. You pick your restaurant, you sit in their space, you order. Ragu was the one we chose, a station so small it could have been a food truck, run by one person who took the order, went in the back, cooked the food, and brought it out.
It was the best meal of the entire Montreal stay, possibly of the whole trip. I ate more at that lunch than I think I ate at any other meal on the trip. I kept stopping because I wanted to make it last, and then I kept going because I couldn’t help it.
After Ragu we went to find the Underground City, which M had wanted to do all week. Montreal has a network of corridors running multiple stories below street level connecting hotels, shops, metro stations, event spaces, restaurants — you can move through a significant portion of the downtown without ever coming up for air. We wandered down and kept going deeper, level after level, corridor connecting to corridor. Somewhere in there we found a bakery where M got a small chocolate birthday cake and I got a little cake of my own, and we carried them home because we were still too full from Ragu to eat them.
I had booked a campsite for her birthday week that had a large private patio, much more space than our usual spot. We ate the cake there that evening and she picked the movie for the night, which is the appropriate birthday privilege.
While we were at the campground that week, we noticed something going on with several of the other rigs — stickers on the front of the campers and on the backup cameras too, all the same design. We asked around and found out it was Fantasy RV, a company that runs organized caravan tours: you pay to join, they plan the route and handle all the bookings, you travel in a convoy of 22 to 25 rigs with a leader out front and a tail gunner at the back making sure nobody gets left behind. There were two caravans launching from our campground while we were there, both headed to the Northeast provinces. Their Alaska trip is what caught my attention. I’ve been thinking about it since – bucket list, maybe?
Tuesday: The Fireflies
Tuesday was a campground day, which for M means watercolors and drawing and writing, and for me means reading, and that was exactly what we did. We were well into the afternoon before either of us moved much.
What we did notice, once we started paying attention, was the fireflies. They had found the morning-sun side of the camper — the passenger side, where our door is — and they were gathered there in numbers, doing what fireflies do in late spring. M was the one who spotted the small red eggs they had left on the side of the camper. We were mid-firefly-mating-observation when it occurred to both of us that this was not the first time a natural event had made itself very much at home in our camping situation.
There was the year gypsy moth pupae dropped from the trees on strings while we were trying to load the camper, half-inch caterpillars attached to silk threads floating out of the branches and landing on everything — the camper, our equipment, us — and getting inside because they would come in on whatever they’d attached to. There was the season we drove through a cicada emergence of what felt like historic scale on the way to Alabama, multiple broods overlapping for the first time in decades, the noise so constant and so loud that sleeping felt optimistic. There were the cottonwood years, once in Wyoming and once at Niagara, when the trees released their cotton pods and the white stuff rolled through the campground like fog, clogging the window screens and the fans and finding its way into every surface of the camper. Each one at the time felt like a unique assault. Together they form a pattern of nature treating our campsite as a venue.
We got our first campfire of the trip going that evening. Nearly two and a half weeks in, the first one. Between weather and cold and activity and everything Winifred had needed in the early weeks, it just hadn’t happened yet. It felt like something we’d earned.
The Middle Days
Wednesday: lunch at a place I’d been excited about after Ragu proved that Montreal does Italian bolognese right. It didn’t. The pasta was pasty and gummy and I ate maybe three bites before the restaurant, to their genuine credit, offered me something else and eventually comped the meal entirely. M enjoyed hers. We did a grocery run and called it a day.
Thursday was better. We went to one of the famous Montreal bagel shops to watch the process — and the process is worth watching regardless of your feelings about the bagels themselves. The dough gets made, boiled, rolled in seeds, loaded onto a paddle the length of a dining table, slid into a wood-fired oven, flipped, pulled out, sorted. The whole operation is visible and it moves fast. As for the bagels: I found them mealier than I’d expected, less of the chew I’d been told about. The guy working the paddle was more interesting than what came out of the oven.
From there we went to the Biodome, which is built inside the old velodrome from the 1976 Olympics and contains five climate zones — Arctic, tropical, Gulf of St. Lawrence, sub-Antarctic, Laurentian forest — each with the appropriate animals and temperature. The Arctic section had physical ice walls you could touch.
The tropical section had a sloth in the canopy who was not moving and not planning to move, high up in the branches, indifferent to the humans filing past below. We stayed longer in the tropical section than we’d planned. The adjacent Planetarium had a Mars colonization exhibit as its main feature — very much of the moment given everything happening with SpaceX — that put you inside the experience of being a colonist on the red planet, which was unsettling in an interesting way.
Friday: Leaving Montreal
The travel day to the Thousand Islands was 161 miles, and the first notable thing was that Winnifred needed a wash. Montreal has a lot of trees over its campgrounds, and by this point she was carrying the evidence. I found a truck wash on the route, which is how we’ve always handled it — truck washes are sized right for Winnifred.
What I didn’t account for was the truck in front of us in line.
The attendants were working that truck with pressure washers, really getting after it, and somewhere in the process the force of the water stripped the vinyl lettering off the license plate. The numbers just came off. The truck went in with a complete license plate and came out with a metal rectangle where the numbers used to be. I watched this happen from the line and could not get out of the line, because truck washes are one-way — you commit when you enter, and you’re in until you’re through. M checked our plates when we came out the back. Fortunately, everything was intact. I said a small thank you and kept moving.
We crossed from Quebec into Ontario during the drive, and it was immediately noticeable. The roads were still under construction in stretches, but there were white lines on them. After weeks in Quebec, where roads wide enough for three lanes often had no markings at all, the white lines felt almost formal. The language on the signs shifted too: Quebec signs had been entirely in French; Ontario signs put English first and French second.
The Thousand Islands KOA was beautiful — wooded site, nice patio, the kind of campground that looks exactly right. The site itself was spectacularly unlevel. We ran through the automatic leveling system six or seven times, shifting the camper a few feet in each direction trying to find a position that would let all four wheels stay on the ground. We couldn’t find one. The campground sent a guy with wood blocks to prop the front wheels, which is not how the leveling system is supposed to work and is a conversation I’m going to be having with myself about leveling blocks for the rest of this trip.
Road Trip Rhythm
AJR is M’s favorite band, and this song really encompasses both sides of life on the road. Things that go bad often give you the best stories, a lesson M has certainly learned as she’s grown older.
Favorite Snapshot
