The trip was wonderful. We arrived very late Thursday night, and when I saw the room had two beds perpendicular to each other I started to cry because I was so tired and that was the last straw. While on the phone with my mother I realized none of the furniture was bolted down and the beds were made of lightweight wood, so we switched things around and I was much happier.

Friday morning I tried to navigate us to La Ronde, which started its life as the amusement section for the 1967 World’s Fair and was recently bought by Six Flags. We ended up driving across the city a couple of times before finally getting there. I had forgotten to wear sunblock but only got a light burn on my forehead and nose; we waited in lines all day and went on all of the coasters.

On Saturday we went out to Bonsecours (about an hour from Montreal) and visited the Mine Crystal Québec, which gave a tour of the quartz mine entirely in French that we could listen to on tape in English via Walkmans with headphones. It wasn’t terribly elegant, but it worked okay; I was glad they didn’t include too much on the Vedic text but instead tried to be factual (while also not omitting everything mystical). The tour took 90 minutes, longer than we’d expected, and by the time we got back to the city we were ready for a nap. I tried to get online but the number was out of service, so I called my mother to have her check, hoping I’d copied down the wrong number. No dice - it was the right number, I’m just unlucky. I played Transport Tycoon while A slept, which she stopped doing as soon as a family moved in down the hall with lots of loud children and lots of door slamming. That night we tried to go to Girly’s, a lesbian café mentioned in the guidebook my dad bought for us. We probably should have called first, as it turned out that place was closed and replaced with something called Dee Dee Dragon, which wasn’t even open.

Sunday we drove out to the countryside again, looking for a town called Sutton. We had a brochure for a chocolate museum there, but it turned out to be a very small shop whose tour probably consisted of an hour’s lecture on chocolate - in French. We wandered around the town for a little bit, then came back to the city and walked around Vieux-Port and went through the labyrinth. We tried to go to a restaurant called La Maison Kam Fung for dinner, but we weren’t thrilled with the menu posted outside, so we went to the IGA supermarket near our hotel (it’s part of the Complexe Desjardins) and picked up some things from the deli to eat at our hotel.

Monday was the great (mis?)adventure at the Olympic complex. We went on the tour of the stadium - it’s big enough that they can shoot fireworks inside, even with the roof on - and then went up the tower and looked around. After lunch we walked through the Biodôme, but it was so crowded we couldn’t really see much; I did get some good pictures but not as many as I’d have liked. There was a welcome video at the entrance to the Biodôme that played in English and then in French before starting over, and it had both open captions and an interpreter in an oval. The interpreter for the English was just a kid - maybe about 12 - and I wouldn’t say he did a great job (he looked really nervous), but the interpreter for the French was older and did fine. ASL is mostly the same in the United States and Canada so I understood both versions, but it was really strange to see words like “water” signed in the French version: the sign for water is initialized with a W, but the interpreter for the French section mouthed the word “eau” while signing the W-initialized sign. After the Biodôme we took the free shuttle over to the Insectarium and Botanical Gardens. I couldn’t handle the Insectarium: I do not like bugs at all, so I sat near the gift shop until A was done. We walked around the gardens after that, and when we finished we headed back to where we’d been dropped off by the shuttle, only to find it stopped running at 6:30 even though the gardens didn’t close until 7:00. We had already been walking for hours and hours, and we dragged ourselves back to the Pie-IX station of the Métro. A was too exhausted to get dinner, so around 10pm I picked up Chinese from one of the many restaurants around our hotel.

After having walked around for nine hours on Monday, we didn’t want to do much walking on Tuesday. We went to the Notre Dame Basilica and took the tour there, then walked through the Marché Bonsecours and had lunch there. One of the shops had an old copy of Kanawa, the Canadian paddling magazine, but wouldn’t sell it to me; instead the shopkeeper (who wasn’t very friendly) told me I might be able to find it at a store called Multi-Mags, so I looked them up in the phone book. There were several locations along Rue Sainte-Catherine, but A wanted to go back to the hotel so I walked up there myself. I had wanted to stop in at another shop along there, and then I kept walking in the same direction looking for 352 Rue Sainte-Catherine. When I got there, I saw no Multi-Mags, so I asked at another store and the guy told me they were a few blocks up. I walked and walked, then finally realized around the 800 block that I was on Rue Sainte-Catherine Est instead of Sainte-Catherine Ouest. I kept going for a few more blocks, visited the Gay Chamber of Commerce, and finally reached the Multi-Mags on Sainte-Catherine Est…only to find they didn’t have the magazine. I gave up and dragged myself back to the hotel; that night we ate at the food court in the Complexe Desjardins.

Wednesday was spent driving home, of course. We got caught in a traffic jam before we were fifty kilometers outside the city, and were forced to get gas at a full-service station (there are surprisingly few self-service places up there). We had lunch from McDonald’s - it had been forever since I’d eaten there, but Canada has the McVeggie and the nutritional information indicated it wasn’t that bad for me. (I had given up on the diet, and while I was trying not to be stupid I also wasn’t counting points or anything…it was just too hard while on vacation where I couldn’t get anything reliably and had to eat out a lot.) We had planned to stop for the night in Hershey and visit Hersheypark on Thursday, but I realized it would be very expensive and we agreed we could make it home…we got in around 11pm.

Thursday we went to Six Flags America, which was a blast. It was cloudy and cool, so there were no crowds and no lines; we were able to stay on some of the rides after the first time around. We mostly went on roller coasters, as we had done at La Ronde, but we also went on the freefall and the whitewater rafting ride, which - to our dismay - soaked us including our jeans (we should have known better!). I was glad to see that Joker’s Jinx was open; it had been closed last year because its restraint system wasn’t good enough. That was the first time I was on a LIM coaster, and it was great. I ended up making my own track record page after seeing that Coasterbuzz now wants you to pay $20 to use theirs.

I have gotten all the pictures from the trip off the digital camera, but I have yet to select the good ones, resize them, and crop out excess stuff. There were about 200, but many are duplicates; I’ll probably still end up with a lot so I may post them on Yahoo! Photos as I did with the Turkey pictures.