Car rides to Montreal

Lydia transports me from Toronto to Hamilton

As it turned out, and not surprisingly, I didn't get any sleep. I spent the night packing gear and last minute stuff. Later on I would find that I forgot a bunch of things. Underwear, socks, map of Montreal, compass, camera batteries, and the battery chargers for the Nikon EN-EL3e camera batteries. D'oh! That's what happens when you pack last minute.

But I did have my GPS.

At 8:30 Lydia dropped by to pick me up. She had just gotten off work and was driving into Hamilton. Convenient? Yes, very. To thank her I offered to take her to breakfast or dinner as the case may be. It was at Steve's (I think it was steve's), a breakfasty place in Hamilton, that we ran into Melanie. What a small world. After breakfast Allison showed up for a cup of coffee and some take away food.


Mel peeks over Allison's seat

We unloaded Lydia's car of my gear, stashed it at Allison's and went off to do some errands. It didn't take long and before we knew it we were on the road to Montreal with Doug and Paul.


Doug, Paul, and Allison


Road paint testing

Compared to the bus trip to La Belle Province a few months ago travel in the Jeep was pretty low key. One of the highlights of the trip was we drove through an area for road paint tests. At least that's what the sign indicated. I imagined it was a paint crew that went nuts but instead of removing the paint off the road it was cheaper to add a sign. "Look at me! I'm the Picasso of the Road!!!! A-hah HA ha ha." Yes, completely nuts.


Allison's 407 conspiracy.

The second interesting thing was Allison's theory of the 407 highway and usage of it. For those that don't know, it's a highway built and maintained by a private company. As such to use it one has to pay extra to roll the wheels of the vehicle along it. Because of that generally the road isn't used as much as the local government owned highway. Allison's thought was if she owned the 407 she'd get trucks to drive slowly down the government highway to get other drivers to be fed up and pay the 407 guys just so they could get to where they were going faster.

A little while after putting that idea into the air we slowed down because two trucks were hogging the road.


Eating outside Cornwall


Hee hee hee.

And the third interesting thing about the trip was that the GPS seemed to give us wonky information. It kept computing ways to get to Montreal by getting us off the highway. It wasn't until we arrived to Montreal that I realized the GPS was in Pedestrian mode. It was probably trying to get us there by sidewalk. Mental note: when driving put GPS in "vehicle" mode.


Leah and Chris in Montreal

Eventually I was dropped off at Sandra and Chris' place where I met up with Leah and Chris. We ate at a Caribbean restaurant while waiting for a couch to arrive.