Returning to Montreal, this time without Lydia as our guide, we took a walking tour of the city. We retraced some of our steps; but mostly filled in the blanks on the map we had from the last trip. Coming from the U.S. and Toronto, Montreal felt very French and we both felt ignorant only speaking English. Something as simple as parking the car required a translator off the street to read the meter.
The highlight of Montreal this trip was the Art Museum's exhibition on American Landscapes, comprised of photographs and painting dating back to the 1600's. At any other time in our lives this exhibition would have simply been pretty pictures, but this road trip had given them personal significance. The exhibition was special to us, as it answered questions of what the landscape looked like before it was heavily populated and helped us to put into perspective the massive landscape changes we have seen on this trip.
One great photograph, revealed some strange limestone spires that were flattened to build Seattle, images like this make us think about how much has been lost in the American advance west.
We spent one very wet afternoon in Quebec City, a completely French city, we had left the bilingual Canada behind us. We walked around it's steep cobble stone streets and saw the old citadel and magnificent castle like hotels. We could only handle the rain for so long and pushed on along the St. Lawrence river towards New Brunswick.
