Hello from Montreal,
We left our Maine home this morning and arrived at our Montreal RV park about eight hours later. The drive was very pretty and sunny most of the day. We went by mountains that showed just the start of changing colors. We had to get authorized through Arrivecan in order to cross the Canadian border. It requires you to know exactly which border crossing you will be using. We didn't have any trouble at the border crossing, although the border agent was definitely not very friendly. We will be crossing the Canadian border two more times on our trip and were told that we had to fill out Arrivecan for each crossing.
Neither one of us speaks any French and the Quebec province is the one Canadian province that speaks French. So we have been taking a crash course on learning road signs, etc. It definitely made for a more challenging drive. Some of the road rules are different in Quebec. A flashing green light is the same as our green turn arrow. The carpool lane is the right lane rather than the left (which we don't think is a good idea - having cars entering the highway into the carpool lane where the cars are going the fastest). Some of the stop signs we came to were not only farther from the road, they were half covered by trees or bushes.
The RV park we are staying in has 85% seasonal residents and the sites are tiny. Luckily no one is in the space on one side of us. It is very noisy. We like to be out in the woods with only the sounds of nature to keep us company but guess this is more typical of a large city RV Park. We met some of our neighbors who only speak French so we did lots of smiling and waving at each other.
We have signed up for a walking tour of Old Montreal tomorrow. It is supposed to rain lightly most of the day but we'll be prepared. Pictures below not too exciting today.
This brings back memories when we took the Montreal subway to the old Expo stadium and attended a baseball game. All signage was in French. We had trouble figuring out how to buy the ticket and then how to maneuver the turnstyle. Finally a quite frustrated local behind us helped. At the game we just pointed to the hot dogs and beer signs with one or two fingers raised, and then handed the currency to the vendor hoping they were honest with the change.
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