Travelblogue

Image by duncan_idaho_2007 via Flickr

So I think Proust may be right - I will need to eat raclette again to fully remember and experience the visit to a little town at the foot of the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec called St Sauveur - and I think that brisket may be the clue to Ottawa. To remember Gail and Toronto will need no Pavlovian/Proustian trigger - I need only think of love and friendship and I will be here again. My naughty friend has grown into an 'awesome' woman, kind,compassionate and funny.

My mind is full of jumbled images - Niagara and butterflies, Montreal and snow and Ottawa and rivers and canals and museums all joined by long highways that travel through forests,over rivers and by the side of lakes. I have walked though a thousand years of history at the Museum of Mankind in Ottawa, visited the homes and art of the First Nations there. I have finally seen a 3d movie and been to an Imax and therefore now know that if Arabia didn't invent it first it wasn't worth having.

Montreal was a montage of catching up: with Debbie and with another lost friend Ida. It was Ida who provoked a baba memory when she spoke of my father stitching her chin after she crashed it on a seesaw. Both Gail and I were right back to the game of seesaw jumping - three on one end and one on the other, sent flying high and then landing with a crash. In Ida's case, badly.

I collect cathedrals and so we went to Notre Dame:$5.00 to go in!!!!! Am I the only one who read the bible story about Jesus in the Temple? They kindly let me light a candle and as always I prayed to St Jude. We drove through cobbed streets and saw flashes of old buildings and a time when Montreal was emerging as a major city and link in the travels of the new colonists from France. That is the thing about Canada - all new yet oddly familiar. On our journey home we passed through Richmond Hill and Kingston only they were about a hundred miles apart not simply separated by Richmond Park.

I have seen butterflies and geese, wild turkeys and black squirrels - I long for a bear or a wolf but suspect I need to go further west and north next time. Oh my friends, this has been such a glorious journey that I feel reborn - pray to whatever gods you hold dear that this feeling of optimism lasts: I did to St Jude.

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• Revisiting Mont-Royal and Old Montreal - Ottawa, Canada (travelpod.com)
• Ottwa - Toronto, Canada (travelpod.com)
• Montreal (Quebec, Canada) - Montreal, Canada (travelpod.com)