Weekend #3 Adventures

Saturday: 

Cody Arrived in the Morning!

As soon as he arrived, I planned a whole list of things I wanted to show him! We rented bikes from HQ and rode all the way to our first stop which was St. Vieatur’s Bagels, of course, becasue its delicious! We each got a single bagel, some cream cheese, went outside to sit on a bench and enjoy our breakfast.

The original St. Vieatur’s shop is actually very close to Mt. Royal. Even though we drove up the other weekend, I wanted to go again and find a different view. So we rode all the way up Mt. Royal (the mountain Montreal is named after, I can’t remember if I said that before) and found another amazing view:

The ride up was tough but the ride down was a breeze, we coasted all the way down to our lunch spot which was Schwartz! The famous smoked meat sandwich place. Montreal is known for three things: poutine, bagels and smoked meat and I was going to check all three off my list. The line to get into the actual restaurant was so long but right next door there was a take-away section. We waited in line at the take-away section for a good 10-ish mins before getting up to order, it was a busy place. We both ordered the standard/traditional smoked meat sandwich with a side of smoked meat poutine 🙂 We got our fill of smoked meat. Needless to say, it was yummy.

Schwartz was on Rue St. Laurent which is the street you can take all the way down to Old Port, so we hopped on our bikes and tried to avoid people as best we could going down the sidewalks. Old Port is pretty hilly so we found a bike rack and started walking around where we found a nice fountain the take a nap by.

We walked through Old Port, went back to the maple shop and had a sample of the iced maple syrup. They put a maple syrup concentrate on a bed of ice, stick a popsicle in it and roll it right up! It’s a cold maple-y treat! Way too sweet to have a big one though, that’s why we only got samples.

I still hadn’t been inside the Basilica so we walked by again but there was still an incredibly long line out front so we never ended up going in but we did see a bride and groom drive by out front!

At that point we were getting tired and knew we had to ride our bikes all the back to HQ so I thought going through the Gay Village on our way back up to the residence would be a good idea so Cody could see it…well we get out 3/4 of the way down the street and my tire popped…I had been on the metro before and I didn’t see anyone with a bike so I didn’t know if they were allowed, no taxi or über was going to put a bike in their car, so what did we do? We walked. All. The. Way. Home. 5 Miles…Sorry Cody. BUT the silver lining was that we were going to an all-you-can-eat sushi place for dinner! So the exercise was a good thing 🙂

The sushi place was actually down by Schwartz so we definitely weren’t walking or biking there. We grabbed and über, demolished A TON of delicious sushi from a huge menu to pick from, some beer and some sake and called it a night!

Sunday: 

It was supposed to rain on Sunday at around 1pm and I knew I wanted to go to the Jean-Talon Market for breakfast so we rented bikes again (not the same bike with the popped tire) and rode to the market.

The very first stop I wanted to make was to get some of that corn that looked so delicious last time! And it was absolutely worth coming back for, fresh sweet corn with some butter and salt, ummhmm good.

We also wanted real breakfast so there was a crepe place right in the market that looked fantastic last time I was there as well. We both order one and they were pretty big, but again, delicious.

We arrived back at the residence just in the nick of time before it started raining. It was a movie kind of day, not to mention we were kind of exhausted from yesterday’s schedule. So we relaxed the rest of the day until dinner.

There was a Portuguese place right up the street that was supposed to be phenomenal. It is called O Cantinho and it was probably the best place I ate the entire trip! Bread, butter and olives to start, some wine and delicious Portuguese food. Cody and I ended up splitting the two dished that came with almost everything. The menu was in Portuguese and French, no english, so we asked the server what was good to order. He suggested, if we were looking to try a little of everything (and let’s face it, we always are) these would be the best combos. One was a sample meat dish and the other was a sample seafood dish, both served with fries and a salad. The pictures don’t do it justice, so so so good! And of course there was an absolutely beautiful sunset as we were finishing dinner and walking home.

Great weekend! I had checked everything off my bucket list and I still had a week to go!

Next will be my final week in Montreal! I can’t believe it was almost a month at that point, the time flew by!

Xx, Betsy