Despite the fact that Canada is known for its maple sugar and maple syrup, the title of this post does NOT refer to our sweet experiences in Montreal but instead to its traffic. It is monstrously congested and it moves like molasses. After negotiating Ottawa with relative ease by motorcycle and managing to find some robustly scenic routes, we had high hopes for Montreal. Wrong.

Our afternoon tour of the city began well enough with a fairly rapid entry to the east side of town, aiming for the 1967 Olympic Village. It’s impossible to miss miles away even across the St. Lawrence River, with its massive stadium rooftop removing Montreal Tower (see below) hovering over the huge park that encompasses what was once part of the Olympic Village. It is the world’s tallest inclined tower at 574 feet.

The tower is impressive, even if it’s performance has been less than stellar. For me, it highlights that Montreal, aside from being a major center of commerce and culture for Canada, as well as home to several highly-regarded universities, is consummately a city designed for athletic endeavors. Aside from the Olympic Games, it hosts marathons and triathlons on its lovely winding roadways, as well as international and national road races on a world-class race track. Its streets are covered with cyclists and runners, and it even has an island that appears to be dedicated to all these sports. If its traffic could move as fast as its cyclists or even its runners, it would really be a city on the move.

Instead, from the tower we crawled along Sherbrooke down into the center of town to find McGill University and the McCord Museum, a small museum that covers Montreal’s heritage and history, with equal attention paid to the First People’s contributions as well as its builders of commercial dominance. Throughout the museum, there was a theme of clothing that people wore throughout the different eras of Montreal’s history.

Representative items from Montreal’s history

1920’s Dress

Inuit Parka

Chief’s Ceremonial Dress

We emerged from the museum just in time to experience Montreal’s rush hour traffic, and spent the next half hour moving about a mile that finally brought us to Montreal’s racetrack island. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is located on Notre Dame Island and is most noted (for us) to be the Montreal home of the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix. This was Roger’s first opportunity to actually drive a vehicle around a racetrack course, and he enjoyed every minute of it. Fortunately, we were dodging other cyclists and skateboard riders (or perhaps they were dodging us) instead of little insect-looking cars going 200 mph. Even without the crowds and the obnoxiously loud muffler-less cars whizzing by, there was still a feeling excitement emanating from the road. It was a super natural high.

After that, the detours and construction and missing signs that added about 30 km to our original trip home and the delays of crawling traffic sucked the joy out of Montreal. We were truly bedraggled when we got back to our campsite, whipped but at least in one piece. I think we forgot to eat dinner, but at least we slept well.