Craig and Amy en Quebec, eh?
Thinking about going to Canada, eh?
This is the story of our recent journey to Montreal, the Eastern Townships, Quebec City and l'Isle d'Orleans, last week. We were visiting my Aunt Ruth and our cousin Diana Moore, and going to see the old cemetery and various old homesites of our Canadian ancestors. This took us to some beautiful countryside. I tried to write it while we were there, but one principal great thing about this trip was the great, great, great food and I got a wee bit sick so I couldn't do it at the time.
This is Aunt Ruth, a looker isn't she? She still is, and a great laugher too.
General travel notes:
There are great deals from SFO to Canada. We did a fairly last minute booking on United.com's vacation site and got car, air and 6 nights hotel for $730 US each. On top of that we had to pay parking, and we found we ended up spending a lot in Montreal on fancy food and wine. But that's the way it goes... and you could go cheaper.
A word of caution in Quebec -- don't EVER think you can tell from signs, where you are going. Freeway signs especially. The rule seems to be that if you didn't know you should have gotten off at this exit, you shouldn't be on the road. They will never say "Airport - exit 1/2 mile", instead the sign will say in the middle of the road, straight ahead for Dorval airport, and half a mile later you realize you just zoomed by the exit.
Cars - our deal came with a car - I would say in Montreal you don't need one, just use the metro! And walk. I would recommend buying a one-week pass (Monday to Sunday), so you can hop on whenever you are tired or want to get to a new neighborhood.It's costly to park and it's so great to walk.
You do need a car for the countryside. But if you aren't doing the countryside it might be nice just to take the train to Quebec City where you don't want a car either.
The language. Definitely helps to try out French. However it is so funny to try to be understood and to understand if you are used to European French. The French in Quebec is supposed to be what old country french was like - it's very twangy and sometimes harsh. Every morning on TV we'd get the weather report from "Suzy Poisson" and try hard to decipher it -- "maintenant" is something like "Montana-ing".
Also the bilingual signage is entertaining. Because the French language police work very very hard to be sure nothing sounds too English, you have to go along Avenue Atwater Ave. to get to the Marchet Atwater Market; Starbucks is often found but of course it's Cafe Starbucks Coffee. The very famous deli which everyone calls Schwartz is Chez Schwarz Charcuterie Hebraique de Montreal.
This is a shop sign near Schwarz's - a small Portuguese store:
Because we were visiting old family sites in the Eastern Townships, which used to have a lot of English speaking folks until about 1976, we visited a lot of towns which got re-christened at that time to sound French. Kingsey, Abbotsford, Chester, Granby and Clifton are now "St Felix de Kingsey", "St Paul d'Abbotsford," "St Helene de Chester", "St Alphonse de Granby" and "St Edwidge de Clifton". St. Edwidge!!!
But even French speaking people don't use the new names much. I have a great grandmother who was born in what's now on the map as St-Andre'-est but people looked really puzzled when I asked about it until I realized it's still pronounced St Andrews (a photo of this place is way below).
Montreal
We loved Montreal. There are so many great neighborhoods to walk around in there - the touristy Vieux Montreal, the fabulous Rue St. Denis for eating and shopping, the Quartier Latin, the small portuguese and jewish neighborhood in Rue Rachel, the small vietnamese/moroccan/immigrant places near Rue St Laurent. Where Ruth lives in Westmount is another great stretch, of more luxurious boutique shops, on Rue Sherbrooke.
We walked so much we got very tired and achy then would have to have some food and drink before we could walk some more.
The architecture is always nice - rows of tasteful brick townhouses with lovely wood and iron details, or large grey stone or brick manors with green copper swooping mansard roofs, predominate.
These get softened by summer flowers and hanging pots. Plus when you want the outdoors you can easily go running or hiking from almost anywhere downtown up in the woods and park on Mount Royal.
There was plenty of street action - the first weekend we caught the last day of the Festival Just pour rire, just for laughing, and all other days there were lots of students and lots of other tourists plus the very nicely dressed Montreal girls. Fashion is a lot more important there. People are a lot more slender. It's nice.
There are lots of languages being spoken although of course the main thing is the "French" - more on that later. There are a fair number of people from Maroc, Algerie, etc, and Lebanese restaurants abounded
We were really lucky our first night to be out where the streets were closed for the Just pour Rire. Everyone was having fun just walking and clustering around the street performers. One sidestreet was set up for large board games, people were playing with creative chess and checkers and backgammon under giant fake tulips. Many street acrobats were performing. There were troupes of giant dragons on stilts being escorted by tall witches. Too bad we didn't get pictures of this!
Food
Sunday, when we arrived after a redeye, following Sharon's advice we had crepes, and we kept going on this theme all week. Our favorite breakfast was at Eggspectation, on Rue Maisonneuve, they have crepes with smoked ham/asparagus/mushrooms/brie type cheese or roast chicken and veggies, or just with maple sugar, or brie and maple sugar-- all good. Our favorite drink was the enormous "boule" of cafe au lait - which is a fresh good latte that's so much better from an earthenware bowl 6" wide, always with great quality foam and flavor...
Crepes and cafe au lait are always much cheaper and better away from Vieux Montreal and especially away from Vieux Quebec - there you get something made for tourists and the veggies are sometimes out of a can! Canned asparagus and mushrooms - just imagine.
Restaurants: we really enjoyed L'Express at 3927 St denis, it doesn't have a sign you just have to know it's there, it's tasty bistro food, and we had salade de chevre chaud, veal and lamb shanks, with a languedoc wine, followed by baba au rhon.
We also went to a great restaurant in Old Montreal called Le Bourlinguer, the traveler, which has a fixed price dinner which is fabulous.
Aunt Ruth took us to a great restaurant in a reconstructed mill in Sherbrooke, Quebec - she tricked us and the waitress into thinking she knew the chef! we got great food. My dad knew this trick too. Works great. She's very smart. This is a picture of Diana Moore, her mother and my father were first cousins, and Craig, and Ruth.
Craig and I also enjoyed a restaurant on Isle d'Orleans which is also in an old mill - Le Moulin de St Laurent -
One of the best places in Montreal to buy food and especially fresh cheeses, fruit, berries, chocolate, bread, maple syrup products, and wine is the public market, Marche Atwater Market.
It has a nearby subway stop Lionel Groux. This is the outside of the market:
and here is the inside:
We were in the market early in the morning sitting having our bowl of cafe au lait while the local folks who work in the shops and stalls were getting their own morning coffee. One girl who stopped in had her hair all wrapped up provincial French style in cloth, just like in the painting of The Girl with the Blue Earring. She was lovely. I never saw her again, but here's another lovely girl:
The local cheese shop was great at recommending things to try. Every one we tried was good. We had these at breakfast one morning and by the end of our trip we discovered we had been to all the places they are made! that was neat -- Oka, Baluchon St Anne de la Perade, Chevre Caprond from Ferme Tourilli in Portneuf, the bleu from St Benoit du Lac.
We found a really great cheese factory at an abbey in Oka, and later we found a map and booklet about artisan cheese makers which I picked up a couple of extra copies of. If you have a car it could be great. Unfortunately we had a hard time finding some of the places and realized that the larger cheesemakers also have shops where they sell their mass produced pasteurized cheeses in conjunction with selling soft ice cream and snacks. It's a major type of quebec fast food stop called a "bar laitier". They think it's real normal I guess - cheese + ice cream under one roof.
Quebec City
Quebec City is lovely too.
Here is a picture I took there just for Sharon. We listened while we ate fresh English-style warm raspberry pudding:
French-style country house
Family things
One of the reasons I went on this trip is that my father's family has lived in Quebec since about 1830, and my Aunt feels he would very much like his remains to be buried with his folks' at Maple Grove Cemetary, in Melbourne, Quebec. This is the house Ruth and Dad went to for Christmas, in Melbourne, when they were young:
That's the Ewing cousins in front, Diana, Ruth and me.
Back in the 1830s, much of the land was farmed by Torys who came up from the US after the Revolution, and this land was sold to Scots and Yorkshire people who came in the 1830s, when times were getting hard because of population growth and the industrial revolution and other changes. These are all my dad's ancestors...
So we went to see the very lovely stretch of the St. Francis River where our ancestors had farms on both sides - especially in Trenholm, on the east side, and Ulverton and Melbourne ridge, on the west side. The two were connected by ferries in the summer, and in the winter, I guess you could just sleigh across the ice; in 1849 they built a covered bridge.
Here's a farm that has been in the Trenholm/Armatage/Smith line since the 1840s
Here's a church that my Yorkshire ancestors, who were brickmakers, built
This is a lovely old woolens mill back behind Ulverton - lots of my ancestors had grist mills, timber mills, and some weaving mills on streams in the area
This is St. Andrews church, and my grandmother's family:
Here's my dad in his youth, and his father in HIS youth:
Here are Craig and Ruth laughing too much in the cemetery
and me too!
This is the story of our recent journey to Montreal, the Eastern Townships, Quebec City and l'Isle d'Orleans, last week. We were visiting my Aunt Ruth and our cousin Diana Moore, and going to see the old cemetery and various old homesites of our Canadian ancestors. This took us to some beautiful countryside. I tried to write it while we were there, but one principal great thing about this trip was the great, great, great food and I got a wee bit sick so I couldn't do it at the time.
This is Aunt Ruth, a looker isn't she? She still is, and a great laugher too.
General travel notes:
There are great deals from SFO to Canada. We did a fairly last minute booking on United.com's vacation site and got car, air and 6 nights hotel for $730 US each. On top of that we had to pay parking, and we found we ended up spending a lot in Montreal on fancy food and wine. But that's the way it goes... and you could go cheaper.
A word of caution in Quebec -- don't EVER think you can tell from signs, where you are going. Freeway signs especially. The rule seems to be that if you didn't know you should have gotten off at this exit, you shouldn't be on the road. They will never say "Airport - exit 1/2 mile", instead the sign will say in the middle of the road, straight ahead for Dorval airport, and half a mile later you realize you just zoomed by the exit.
Cars - our deal came with a car - I would say in Montreal you don't need one, just use the metro! And walk. I would recommend buying a one-week pass (Monday to Sunday), so you can hop on whenever you are tired or want to get to a new neighborhood.It's costly to park and it's so great to walk.
You do need a car for the countryside. But if you aren't doing the countryside it might be nice just to take the train to Quebec City where you don't want a car either.
The language. Definitely helps to try out French. However it is so funny to try to be understood and to understand if you are used to European French. The French in Quebec is supposed to be what old country french was like - it's very twangy and sometimes harsh. Every morning on TV we'd get the weather report from "Suzy Poisson" and try hard to decipher it -- "maintenant" is something like "Montana-ing".
Also the bilingual signage is entertaining. Because the French language police work very very hard to be sure nothing sounds too English, you have to go along Avenue Atwater Ave. to get to the Marchet Atwater Market; Starbucks is often found but of course it's Cafe Starbucks Coffee. The very famous deli which everyone calls Schwartz is Chez Schwarz Charcuterie Hebraique de Montreal.
This is a shop sign near Schwarz's - a small Portuguese store:
Because we were visiting old family sites in the Eastern Townships, which used to have a lot of English speaking folks until about 1976, we visited a lot of towns which got re-christened at that time to sound French. Kingsey, Abbotsford, Chester, Granby and Clifton are now "St Felix de Kingsey", "St Paul d'Abbotsford," "St Helene de Chester", "St Alphonse de Granby" and "St Edwidge de Clifton". St. Edwidge!!!
But even French speaking people don't use the new names much. I have a great grandmother who was born in what's now on the map as St-Andre'-est but people looked really puzzled when I asked about it until I realized it's still pronounced St Andrews (a photo of this place is way below).
Montreal
We loved Montreal. There are so many great neighborhoods to walk around in there - the touristy Vieux Montreal, the fabulous Rue St. Denis for eating and shopping, the Quartier Latin, the small portuguese and jewish neighborhood in Rue Rachel, the small vietnamese/moroccan/immigrant places near Rue St Laurent. Where Ruth lives in Westmount is another great stretch, of more luxurious boutique shops, on Rue Sherbrooke.
We walked so much we got very tired and achy then would have to have some food and drink before we could walk some more.
The architecture is always nice - rows of tasteful brick townhouses with lovely wood and iron details, or large grey stone or brick manors with green copper swooping mansard roofs, predominate.
These get softened by summer flowers and hanging pots. Plus when you want the outdoors you can easily go running or hiking from almost anywhere downtown up in the woods and park on Mount Royal.
There was plenty of street action - the first weekend we caught the last day of the Festival Just pour rire, just for laughing, and all other days there were lots of students and lots of other tourists plus the very nicely dressed Montreal girls. Fashion is a lot more important there. People are a lot more slender. It's nice.
There are lots of languages being spoken although of course the main thing is the "French" - more on that later. There are a fair number of people from Maroc, Algerie, etc, and Lebanese restaurants abounded
We were really lucky our first night to be out where the streets were closed for the Just pour Rire. Everyone was having fun just walking and clustering around the street performers. One sidestreet was set up for large board games, people were playing with creative chess and checkers and backgammon under giant fake tulips. Many street acrobats were performing. There were troupes of giant dragons on stilts being escorted by tall witches. Too bad we didn't get pictures of this!
Food
Sunday, when we arrived after a redeye, following Sharon's advice we had crepes, and we kept going on this theme all week. Our favorite breakfast was at Eggspectation, on Rue Maisonneuve, they have crepes with smoked ham/asparagus/mushrooms/brie type cheese or roast chicken and veggies, or just with maple sugar, or brie and maple sugar-- all good. Our favorite drink was the enormous "boule" of cafe au lait - which is a fresh good latte that's so much better from an earthenware bowl 6" wide, always with great quality foam and flavor...
Crepes and cafe au lait are always much cheaper and better away from Vieux Montreal and especially away from Vieux Quebec - there you get something made for tourists and the veggies are sometimes out of a can! Canned asparagus and mushrooms - just imagine.
Restaurants: we really enjoyed L'Express at 3927 St denis, it doesn't have a sign you just have to know it's there, it's tasty bistro food, and we had salade de chevre chaud, veal and lamb shanks, with a languedoc wine, followed by baba au rhon.
We also went to a great restaurant in Old Montreal called Le Bourlinguer, the traveler, which has a fixed price dinner which is fabulous.
Aunt Ruth took us to a great restaurant in a reconstructed mill in Sherbrooke, Quebec - she tricked us and the waitress into thinking she knew the chef! we got great food. My dad knew this trick too. Works great. She's very smart. This is a picture of Diana Moore, her mother and my father were first cousins, and Craig, and Ruth.
Craig and I also enjoyed a restaurant on Isle d'Orleans which is also in an old mill - Le Moulin de St Laurent -
One of the best places in Montreal to buy food and especially fresh cheeses, fruit, berries, chocolate, bread, maple syrup products, and wine is the public market, Marche Atwater Market.
It has a nearby subway stop Lionel Groux. This is the outside of the market:
and here is the inside:
We were in the market early in the morning sitting having our bowl of cafe au lait while the local folks who work in the shops and stalls were getting their own morning coffee. One girl who stopped in had her hair all wrapped up provincial French style in cloth, just like in the painting of The Girl with the Blue Earring. She was lovely. I never saw her again, but here's another lovely girl:
The local cheese shop was great at recommending things to try. Every one we tried was good. We had these at breakfast one morning and by the end of our trip we discovered we had been to all the places they are made! that was neat -- Oka, Baluchon St Anne de la Perade, Chevre Caprond from Ferme Tourilli in Portneuf, the bleu from St Benoit du Lac.
We found a really great cheese factory at an abbey in Oka, and later we found a map and booklet about artisan cheese makers which I picked up a couple of extra copies of. If you have a car it could be great. Unfortunately we had a hard time finding some of the places and realized that the larger cheesemakers also have shops where they sell their mass produced pasteurized cheeses in conjunction with selling soft ice cream and snacks. It's a major type of quebec fast food stop called a "bar laitier". They think it's real normal I guess - cheese + ice cream under one roof.
Quebec City
Quebec City is lovely too.
Here is a picture I took there just for Sharon. We listened while we ate fresh English-style warm raspberry pudding:
French-style country house
Family things
One of the reasons I went on this trip is that my father's family has lived in Quebec since about 1830, and my Aunt feels he would very much like his remains to be buried with his folks' at Maple Grove Cemetary, in Melbourne, Quebec. This is the house Ruth and Dad went to for Christmas, in Melbourne, when they were young:
That's the Ewing cousins in front, Diana, Ruth and me.
Back in the 1830s, much of the land was farmed by Torys who came up from the US after the Revolution, and this land was sold to Scots and Yorkshire people who came in the 1830s, when times were getting hard because of population growth and the industrial revolution and other changes. These are all my dad's ancestors...
So we went to see the very lovely stretch of the St. Francis River where our ancestors had farms on both sides - especially in Trenholm, on the east side, and Ulverton and Melbourne ridge, on the west side. The two were connected by ferries in the summer, and in the winter, I guess you could just sleigh across the ice; in 1849 they built a covered bridge.
Here's a farm that has been in the Trenholm/Armatage/Smith line since the 1840s
Here's a church that my Yorkshire ancestors, who were brickmakers, built
This is a lovely old woolens mill back behind Ulverton - lots of my ancestors had grist mills, timber mills, and some weaving mills on streams in the area
This is St. Andrews church, and my grandmother's family:
Here's my dad in his youth, and his father in HIS youth:
Here are Craig and Ruth laughing too much in the cemetery
and me too!
posted by Craig and Amy at 10:45 AM
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