My last day in Canada on this trip. And for all I know, my last day ever in Canada. The way my health is going, I shall be hard-pushed to make it back.
But just for a change just recently, I had a good night’s sleep! In bed reasonably early, and out like a light. One trip down the corridor but apart from that it was totally painless until the alarm went off at 06:00. Didn’t feel a thing! My efforts of the last few days have worn me out as you know, and so a good sleep was an essential.
I was rather late for breakfast though and there was quite a crowd. But coffee, orange juice and bagels soon had me up and about.
It was a nicer day today too – some blue sky was out there for a change. With it being my last day, and with my flight not leaving until 22:00 I decided to take advantage of the weather to out and about, to say goodbye to the St Lawrence River. Accordingly, I had a little doze for a while, stuck my suitcase in the “left luggage” and then hit the road at 11:00, just in time to leap on board the bus 202 that was going past.
At the Ducollege Metro Station, I made a decision. I’ve been going one at a time to the different Metro Stations at the end of each line to see what was going on, but I’ve never actually been to the end of the line down from past DuCollege.
That Metro Station is the Cote-Vertu and so I headed off there. And this is a photo of the interior of the station, just to prove that I made it here. And you can even see a train down there at the bottom.
Here’s a photo of the exterior too. It’s situated on the corner of the Boulevard de la Cote Vertu and the Boulevard Decarie. The building is the one over there at mid-height on the left margin of the image.
And really, I should have come here ages and ages ago. It semms to be occupied by the Indian community and there’s a couple of very democratic Indian restaurants there, as well as a pizzeria and a falafel place too. I can quite easily find a place to eat here.
There are lots of other shops too, including a wholesale fruit and veg place that sold me a pound of delicious grapes at just $0:99.
Yes, I missed out here at the Cote Vertu.
Down one of the streets off the Boulevard Decarie I noticed a church, and so I went off down there to look at it.
It’s actually the Church of St Laurent, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise seeing as we are actually in the Borough of St Laurent. The church was built in the 1830s, although the facade was not added unti 50 years later.
It’s not the first church on the site. There was one dating from the 1730s and which was significant in being the first church on the island to be built outside the traditional city limits.
The buildings next door to it were even more impressive than the church. This is the Vanier College and is significant in that it’s one of the very few English-language colleges in Quebec, having opened its doors in 1970.
As for the name, that relates to Georges-Phinéas Vanier, who was one of the very few Canadian-born Governor-Generals, and served from 1959 until 1967, much to the chagrin of the Quebecois extremists.
Prior to the college being here, this was the site of the Couvent Notre-Dame-des-Anges – the Convent of Our Lady of the Angels, run by the Soeurs de Sainte-Croix – the Sisters of the Holy Cross – from whom the land was bought.
There was also a women’s college, the Collège Basile-Moreau, on the site. He was, by the way, the founder of the Order of the Holy Cross.
On the way back to the Boulevard Decarie, I stumbled upon a Charity Shop that was actually open. And here I had an enormous stroke of luck.
I’ve written loads of stuff about abandoned railways and the like, mostly from analysis because there seems to be nothing at all in the way of historical research into Canadian railways. It’s not like the UK, where every inch of old railway is faithfully reported and its history thoroughly researched.
But here sitting on the shelves of the Charity Shop was a book entitled Canadian National Railways – Towards the Invitable Volume 2 1896-1922. It’s long out of print but it covers almost all of the lines in which I have an interest, including the ephemeral railway line to Centreville about which I’ve been barking completely up the wrong tree.
And $3:50? You must be joking!
My perambulations brought me all of a sudden to the DuCollege Metro Station. I realised that despite all of the trips that I have made from here, I’ve never actually taken a photo of the exterior of the building.
This is the time to put this right, even though it’s the other entrance that I habitually use. And while I was taking this photo from the park across the road, I was being smiled at by a couple of these religious people with their portable news stand handing out the literature.
I’d never actually looked down the end of the side-street in daylight either, and I’d been wondering why the street was called “DuCollege”. And I dealt with both of those issues while I was here.
There was this beautiful stone building right down the end of the street so I strolled off down there to inspect it. It’s the CEGEP ST Laurent. The Collège d’Enseignement Général et Professionnel is, I suppose, one level below the University system in the same sense that the old Polytechnics were in the UK – that kind of thing
Although some of the education services here date back almost 175 years, the college came into being in 1967 when the CEGEP system was founded. It goes without saying that it is French-speaking.
As for the church next to the CEGEP St Laurent, well, shame as it is to say it, there I was busy taking a photograph of it – after all, it really is beautiful – and then off I wandered back down the street towards the DuCollege Metro Station having forgotten to make a note of its name.
Anyway, it’s actually situated in the Avenue Sainte Croix, although I do realise that this piece of information isn’t going to help anyone very much.
Back at the Metro station, I hopped on board a train and headed into town. Just as far as the Victoria-OACI station, and then walked up the hill towards the Place d’Armes.
As I walked into the Place d’Armes through the crowds, this interesting vehicle pulled up across the square so that the passengers on board could look at the Cathedral and the statue of Paul Cholmedy, the Sieur de Maisonneuve.
It seems to be another one of these amphibious vehicles of the same type that we saw years ago in Halifax and probably does the same job. I can imagine that there’s some kind of factory somewhere in Canada churning out these machines for the tourism industry.
There’s a “Subway” further on down the street and that’s where I was heading. I’ve been wandering around for quite some time and it’s way past lunchtime. My stomach thinks that my throat has been cut.
Down at the docks, we’re in luck. Last day of our journey and we are able to conjure up a “Ship of the Day”.
She’s the Venture, a self-discharging bulk carrier of 30,000 tonnes and built in 2002. She arrived here after some considerable perambulation in the Mediterranean.
The flag that she is flying, and which I didn’t recognise at first, is the flag of the Marshall Islands, a group of islands (one of which is the legendary “Bikini Atoll” of nuclear-testing fame) in the Pacific and said by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to be “by far the most contaminated place in the world”.
Another claim to fame of the islands is that it probably has more ships than it has inhabitants – a fact probably not unconnected with the islands’ rate of corporation tax of just 3%.
By now the clouds were starting to close in from the south, but the rain was holding off and so I went for a walk along one of the quays.
There must be something up somewhere concerning maritime traffic on the St Lawrence because there was this tug steaming … "dieseling" – ed … up the river. I hadn’t noticed any ship in the vicinity other than the Venture and she didn’t look as if she was preparing for sea, so I wondered where the tug might be going.
Over there on the other side of the dock is the quay where we saw that goelette when I was here in early September. It’s not there now (the ground’s all flat, and beneath it lies the bloke …) though.
In the background over there is the Ile Sainte Hélène and the Biosphere, which was the pavilion of the United States during Expo ’67. It was originally covered by an acrylic sheath but it will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this rubbish to learn that this sheath was destroyed in a fire in May 1976.
From my spec on the dock I walked around the quay onto the waterfront. There were hordes of people here, all taking advantage of the afternoon and what sun was still loitering about.
But never mind the people for the moment. What was interesting me was the autumn colours on the trees here in the Vieux Port. They are magnificent. You can see why I love being here in Canada in the autumn – I wouldn’t be anywhere else.
A little further on along, there was a good view down towards the east past the clock tower. This is a war memorial to the sailors of the Merchant Marine who were lost during World War I and was designed as a replica of Big Ben in London.
Further down is the Pont Jacques Cartier – the Jacques Cartier Bridge that spans the river between Montreal and Longueuil, with the modern port area further along behind.
The weather was now deteriorating rapidly as you can tell from the clouds. Scattering a cloud of pigeons, I walked around the docks to the old commercial port.
We’ve talked about the goelettes – the ships that used to run the boat services from Montreal to all of the small towns and villages along the shores of the St Lawrence in the days before the road network.
This was the dock from which they sailed and to which they returned. And all around here back in those days was a kind of market where the people from along the shore who had brought their produce down in the goelettes would set up their stalls to sell their produce.
Feeling the strain again by now I repaired to the old Marché Bonaventure. This has now been restored and occupied by all of these trendy boutiques. But down at the far end is a café where there are some comfy chairs and, surprisingly, coffee on sale at a very democratic price.
A comfy sofa was free so I installed myself there, drank my coffee and read my new book for a while. When I find my strength again, I can move on.
About half an hour or so later I hit the road again, retracing my steps to the Place Victoria and the Metro Station.
Right outside, but across the road from the entrance, I stumbled across a television crew filming someone talking into the microphone about something or other. I’ve no idea who he was and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I took the opportunity to take a photo of him.
I always seem to find a camera crew when I’m on my travels in North America, don’t I?
The metro took me back to DuCollege and there I had to wait ages for the bus 202 to take me back to the Comfort Inn. We had the usual unavoidable performance of persuading the driver to drop me off by the bridge at the end of the Cote de Liesse where I could cross the motorway (otherwise I have to walk for miles and miles because there’s no official bus stop anywhere near there).
There was an airport shuttle already on the road so I grabbed my suitcase, nipped into the Gentlemen’s rest room, and then back outside for the shuttle and on the way to the airport.
In the shuttle were a couple of people and we ended up discussing the Brexit. Even though many Quebecois have been fighting tooth-and-nail for 50 years for independence, the unanimous opinion of my fellow-travellers was that the British vote for the Brexit was the most stupid thing that they have ever heard.
Quebec has an almost-inexhaustible supply of raw materials and an almost-inexhaustible supply of energy. The UK has no raw materials and all of its energy resources are owned by foreigners (even the new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point is to be operated by EDF of France).
It has nothing that anyone would ever want and nothing that would be any use in launching a manufacturing industry.
There was quite a queue at the baggage check-in and I had to wait for about half an hour to hand in my suitcase. And this time, they managed not to drop my passport into the conveyor belt.
The food on Air Transat is total rubbish as I have already told you, and there is a “Subway” downstairs. Consequently, I went off and ordered a 12-inch vegetarian without cheese. Just for once, I asked for the bread to be toasted, and I’m wishing now that I hadn’t, for reasons that I will explain in due course.
The final thing that needed to be done concerned my bus ticket. I had bought a three-day one, as you might remember, and there was over 28 hours remaining on it. I intended to give it to anyone who was about to buy one but although I was there for 10 minutes there was no-one approaching the ticket machine.
What I did therefore was to write on it “valable jusqu’a mardi minuit” – “doesn’t expire until Tuesday at midnight” and left it on the machine. Whoever might need it can just help themselves.
The queue through the security was quite small – about 10 minutes to go through. And much to my surprise, not only was it painless but the staff weren’t the usual arrogant unpleasant staff that you normally find at the airport at Montreal.
I hiked off down to the gate, which was right down at the end of the terminal, and installed myself on a seat where there was a power point (and that took some finding too). Feeling hungry, I attacked my Subway sandwich but half of the filling fell out. Having the bread toasted meant that it wasn’t as pliable and so I won’t be doing that again.
At 21:15 we were called onto the aeroplane. it was an Airbus 330, quite new by the looks of things, and I was lucky in having one of the twin seats near the rear.
Once we had all settled in, we hurtled down the runway and launched ourselves off into the air, heading back to Europe. My stay in Canada was over.
I was desolate – this may well have been my last trip across the Atlantic because I won’t ever be in any better health than I am right now. Who knows where I’ll be in 12 months time? “Pushing up the daisies” I mused to myself.
And here you are – 2658 words of my last day in North America. A world-record number of words.
I hope that you all appreciate it. Don’t forget to “like” it
reminds me of almost every late and lonely night that I have ever spent on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour, this particular track reminds me of just one particular night that was later than most and which I didn’t ever want to end.
