We (Carolyn, Graham Norton the kitty cat and I) recently spent a week in Montreal and the Eastern Townships.
We took the VIA rail from Union Station, which gave us a (too) slow, scenic experience. The train ride tacked on an extra two hours each way! Apparently, the tracks were too hot to travel at speeds greater than 50km/h. The train’s speed topped out at about 140km/h, but really only for brief stretches, and mostly in the shade. North America and trains…
Montreal introduced itself to us with wide boulevards, a pleasing mélange of architecture and sparsely populated restaurants amidst the thirsty edge of a heatwave.
Our hotel was close to Chinatown, all two blocks of it, a tidy agglomeration of East Asian cuisine.
Internet research threw up some choice neighbourhoods to explore, and so we took the metro
(very nice and comfortable, Toronto, are you taking notes?) to Mile End, which can best be described as hipster, when hipster was still a term being used. In essence, fashionably dated. We walked through residential streets to find donuts, ice cream, bagels and a cute Japanese paper shop.
Verdun was another hyped-up neighbourhood that we visited. Its largely known for its beach, which was more of a sad-eyed concrete promenade by the St Lawrence River that morphed into a narrow path dotted with abandoned tents for the unhoused.
Its main shopping street, pegged between La Salle and Verdun metro stations, felt vague, vacillating between overpriced restaurants, dollar stores and ambiguous attempts at street art. ‘Try too hard’ is the Singaporean phrase that springs to mind.
All this while, over the city, the visage of Leonard Cohen looms, his music suffusing streets with gravelly possibilities, shadows of melodies played but never fully known and maybe, Montreal is that apotheosis as a city; caught between the cosmopolitanism of Toronto and the French-forwardness of Quebec.
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The drive out to the Eastern Townships was mostly on Highway 10, a winding highway that led us quickly out of the city limits into open, prairie-like farmland with various small mountains massing in the distance. After the dense brush and relatively flat terrain of Ontario, the undulation was most pleasing. Hiking up the hills was not on the cards, however, but we did get in a number of hikes and made our way through a few small towns that, to be honest, promised more than they delivered.
The cat was intrigued, but not overly impressed
Essentially, the Eastern Townships is cottage country for the Quebecois, who speak French strangely, aren’t that friendly and generally tolerate visitors insofar as they pump tourist dollars to the local businesses.
We stayed in a cute Airbnb in Orford, which is a central base for exploring the region. On our way there, we passed through Knowlton, which has a few historic buildings and the Knowlton Pub, where we inhaled a rather heavy serving of poutine and local stout. In fact, we made a point to drink from local microbreweries throughout the trip, and they did not disappoint! Quebec’s beer might even have the edge over Ontario in its complexity and stopping power.
Believe or not, this is poutine! Well, the Knowlton Pub version of it
We walked along the Cherry River, just a short stroll from our AirBnb, drove to Marais de la Rivière aux Cerises for a very germane hike and popped over to nearby Magog (what a throwback Biblical name!) for supplies from a well-stocked Metro.
Artwork along the Cherry River
It rained for a whole day, so we had to adjust our plans to spend more time in Magog. But when the skies cleared, we drove north to Sherbrooke, which is the largest town in the Eastern Townships. Its more sprawl than anything. The main streets seemed pretty rundown, although a bunch of spread-out murals, which tried to depict the history of the town, was a laudable attempt at encouraging footfall. Still, parts of the town felt pretty rundown and almost unsafe. That being said, we had a classic fast food lunch at Louis Luncheonette, a local chain with affordable prices and mountains of fries. Bois Beckett Park, on the north of Sherbrook town, was an absolutely lovely park to walk in and was well worth the drive.
On our last day, the sun came out and we drove to the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, a Benedictine abbey established by a group of exiled monks from France in 1912. Overlooking Lake Memphremagog, the building, which is modern and quite beautiful, beckoned from a distance. But we couldn’t access the grounds and so we were mostly confined to a well-stocked gift shop that brimmed with local cider, jam and cheeses. I guess monks, too, have to make a living.
Other notable highlights worth a mention: slumming the opening of the Montreal Jazz Festival and catching up with friends over sangria with such eclectic conversation topics like making paint from rocks.
As we get older, it becomes less and less about the bucket list and more about filling smaller containers with these memories, that can be made only in particular seasons of our lives. Also, one can’t always haul around the bucket, but there’s always room on the shelf for one more glass jar.
