The Alouette Camp in Montreal, Thursday, July 28, 2005

The day began with a 'can't miss' event. An early breakfast of bagels and cream cheeses is hosted by the amusing, rarely sedate, thoroughly New York couple, Max & Myra Joseph. Married nearly fifty seven years, they travel in a unique Airstream Argosy with the rare front & rear door option. So what, you might think ?
I envy this because it allows them to actually run around and through their trailer. The balance of us are confined to the single door model (which on occasion may even fail to open), and an aisleway so narrow that it encourages sexual encounters. Or a marital disagreement, I've been told.

We have finally reached Montreal in the province of Quebec which the people here call "Key-beck" because they are often sullen, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, arise on the wrong side of the boudoir, and insist on speaking in a foreign language called French, which is a lot like English, but all the words are pronounced differently and mean something else. Even their signs are printed in words that sound like a serious sinus infection in need of a nasal decongestant.

When your Thetford unit (trailer talk) has failed and you find it necessary to use the dreaded public toilette, you may find this phrase helpful, " Le madamoiselle, c'est la rouleau de papier hygenique ?", or roughly translated, "where's the toilet paper, ma'am ?"

This morning we take the compulsory Grey Line tour of the city, the best and most efficient way to learn about a city of 3.5 million that will not support a major league baseball team, but mourns the loss of a single hockey season. Our afternoon and evening will be spent in an eagerly anticipated reunion with our French-Canadien amies, Pierre Saulnier and Cecile Quirouette, whom we met in Arizona in the winter of 2002. They had embarked on an eleven month odyssey of the U.S., visiting dozens of our national parks and monuments......in a 13 foot camper, the 'little bigfoot', which resembles a fiberglass toaster on steroids. Pierre stands 6'2" (1.8 metres for the metrically challenged) and we airstreamers think we are cramped.

The famed stadium...an architectural delight.















Alert. Apologies;
(a) Pierre and Cecile are NOT grumpy
(b) Everything I said about the French was unwarranted,
unkind, and fabricated
(c) Anything you've read here should not be forwarded to
the provincial language police.
My view of the future does not include a life sentence in monolingual purgatory.






The lottery balls come to life at Les Francofolies De Montreal