Sheep Guarding Llama

We have a completed photo set from Montreal now available of Flickr. Not a lot of pictures though.

Today both Dominica and I return to university for the fall semester. As if we weren’t busy enough!

I forgot to mention yesterday that on the drive home I finished “reading” Simon Winchester’s book “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906“. The book was excellent just like Winchester’s previous title of which I have read several and Dominica has recently begun to enjoy as well.
I got up around five this morning and got ready for work. I am on the early shift this week which means that I have to be up and moving about half an hour earlier than normal which doesn’t sound like a lot but it is already pretty early in the morning for me as it is.

The day itself was pretty uneventful. Nothing really special to report. It was a slow day as I expect most of this week is going to be but there was the obligatory backup of work from the three day weekend to keep me busy even though it was pretty slow overall.

I left work at four thirty after a ten hour day and drove home in light traffic. I found a kid (probably around twenty) stuck on the side of the road with a broken down car. Right on i78 an insanely busy highway. I gave him a lift to work. He said that he had been stuck on the side of the highway for one and a half to two hours without anyone being willing to stop and help him. He didn’t have a cell phone and no one even called the police for him nor did the police pass by in all that time! Now ask me why I don’t like Northern Jersey!

At six this evening I had my very first “Java for Programmers” class online at RIT. This class actually had an “online lecture” and moved very quickly. I am happy with the pace that they are showing in this first class. I am also quite excited that the class is using a highly respected text which also happens to be one that I already own – “Head First Java” from O’Reilly.

Dominica got home at seven after going grocery shopping after work and getting us stocked up on supplies. We ordered in Italian from Nino’s and once my class was over we watched a few episodes of Heroes before going to bed.

Dominica’s Academic Planning class officially starts today but I don’t think that she did anything with it today.  It is not a traditional class so her interaction with the school is pretty minimal.

Happy Labor Day Everybody.

I got up this morning at nine thirty and decided to take a walk through downtown Montreal while Oreo and Dominica slept for a while longer. I went south-east on the av du Parc until it turned into Bleury which I walked the length of and then Rue St. Pierre until it reached the river. Then I went north on the Rue de la Commune Ouest to Boulevard St. Laurent which I took back to the Rue Sherbrooke Ouest and back to the Quality Hotel. All together the walk took one hour.

My hour long walk through downtown Montreal was awesome. The entire weekend Dominica and I never ventured very far from our hotel as we didn’t know the city and didn’t have any definite plans we just took things easy which was a lot of fun but we didn’t get to see nearly as much of the city as we would have liked. During my walk I went through a slice of the big business and commercial district and then into the old part of the city, built by the French, near the waterfront. We really wish that we had a lot more time to explore Montreal and to see what all it has to offer. We hope to be back really soon.

It was eleven when I got back to the hotel and I was quite warm as the sun had come out and the city was heating up. We took Oreo for his morning walk, it was a bit of an emergency, and then Dominica started packing up the hotel room while I showered and got dressed. We checked out just after noon, put Oreo and our luggage into the car in the garage then Dominica and I ran to Werby’s for a late breakfast. Their breakfast was really good and a good price too. Dominica got a smoked salmon omelet that was really good.

It was around two or just a little earlier when we hit the road out of Montreal. Dominica was sad that she had missed so much cool stuff on my morning walk (although she was not sad about all of the walking that she had missed – several kilometers) and she wanted to drive through a lot of it so we drove down along much of the path that I had walked so that she could see it. Now she is even more anxious to return to Montreal as there is just so much great stuff to see.

The drive to the border went quickly and there was almost no traffic at all. We barely saw a vehicle on the road. We stopped at a Quebec souvenir stand just before the border to get a few things to bring back and at the gas station next door to fuel up before going into the northern New York wilderness. Canadian gas is insanely expensive at around four dollars a gallon! It cost me $53 to fill up the PR5’s little gas tank that wasn’t even empty!

The big surprise came when we reached customs at the US border. Even though there had been no traffic at all we found that there was an insane backup at the border. We ended up waiting there for two and a quarter hours! It was hot and sunny too. Dominica was getting sick as the air conditioning in the little old Mazda (it has 101,200 miles on it at this point) just couldn’t keep the car cool with two people and a little black dog in it with all of that glass being pounded with sunlight. And there was no breeze most of the time so the air conditioning was the only option. To keep Oreo cool I was taking bottled water and rubbing it into his ears so that they would keep him cooler. He didn’t really like that but it did the trick. He was warm but fine. We were really fortunate that we had bought ice teas and ice cream just minutes before getting stuck in this traffic back at the gas station just one mile before.

Strangely, when we actually made it up to the customs official working at the border he was very friendly, efficient and let us through with no hassle whatsoever. We were having a hard time figuring out where the delays were coming from if the customs officials were working like this. This was one of the fastest, friendliest US border crossings ever. Totally not what we were expecting. Now, to be sure, we had both of our passports in hand and ready, we are both New York residents (the local state at the border which makes things easier) and we had all of Oreo’s paperwork for International travel ready and in hand. We were as prepared as we could be. We had a normal car with New York plates too. Everything was right for an easy border crossing.

After getting across the border we drove for maybe twenty minutes it seems and stopped in Peru, New York at the McDonald’s to get our lunch.  They were pretty busy and, I am guessing, in for a really busy afternoon.  We ate, walked Oreo and got back on to i87 South (sud in French!) towards Albany.

With the exception of the border crossing (and it is a pretty big exception) there trip went extremely quickly and even on Labor Day there was hardly any traffic at all even as we approached New York City.  We made great time.  We stopped at Ramapo and grabbed a quick bite to eat at our rest stop there and then drove on down to Newark.

It was around ten in the evening when we arrived back at 1180 Raymond Boulevard in Newark.  That means that it took us approximately eight hours from Montreal to Newark.  With two food stops and a 2.25 hour stop at the border that means that the south bound drive time was probably a little bit less than the trip on Friday night.  Very good time indeed.

We unpacked the Mazda, walked Oreo and went straight off to bed.  I am working the early shift tomorrow and need to get some sleep.  Dominica is back to work as well.  Vacation is over.  Also, both of us begin college classes tomorrow too!

Oreo got me up at eight this morning meaning that I only got about four hours of sleep. I am going to be pretty sleepy today.

After Oreo’s walk I set out to the patisserie across the street to get some breakfast pastries and then to the Second Cup on the corner for some coffee. Second Cup has a large outdoor patio area where Oreo is allowed to hang out. So Dominica brought him over from the Quality Hotel and we sat outside enjoying the beautiful morning on the av du Parc in the heart of Montreal.

Dominica was tempted by the lure of fresh quiche from the patisserie so she sent me back over to pick up some tomato, leek, basil and goat cheese quiche that they also heated up for us which we then took back to the hotel to eat. That was our breakfast.

Oreo is limping a bit from what appears to be paw pain. We think that his constant pulling at his leash has caused him to develop raw paw pads so we are minimizing his walking today as much as possible. It is a bright and sunny day and he is very happy lounging in the plentiful sun spots in our hotel room at the Quality Hotel.

Dominica and I are both exhausted today and are taking it extremely easy. We have no plans and it is Sunday so there is very little to do in town today anyway. Our plan was to just lounge as much as possible.

I wasn’t hungry around lunch time so I skipped lunch but Dominica went down to the Werby’s in the hotel and got a big banana crepe. We had several short walks with Oreo throughout the day and watched some television. No naps though.

For dinner, around six, we headed up the street just a little ways to try Thai Express which seems to be popular around here. I wish that I had taken this pic but this is one that I had to find on Flickr. This is the take out containers from the Thai Express. I did some searching to find their website but to no avail.

The good at Thai Express was quite good. The price was good and the quantities were huge. It was a ton of food. We definitely wish that we had one of these back home.

After dinner we came back to the hotel. We thought about going out and exploring the Montreal Underground but discovered that it is closed today because it is Sunday and it might not be open tomorrow because of the holiday. So since we were tired and since my left heel is killing me – we have no idea what is wrong with it but for about two months now the pain has been pretty bad – we decided to just stay in and watch some television and then to go to bed early.

Tomorrow the plan is to leave Monteal around noonish to head back south towards New Jersey. I am hoping that we might get a chance to stop in Plattsburgh for a little bit as I have never stopped there as far as I can remember and I would like to see the port on Lake Champlain.

I woke up this morning, on my own, around eight thirty. It was perfect timing since I had to go down and get the car parked in the garage instead of on the street this morning. So I got up and went down and put a little money in the meter and took a walk to see where we were in the city and get a feel for our location.

I came back to the hotel but Dominica and Oreo were both still fast asleep so I headed back out, got a garage spot and got the car parked. Then I went for another walk and stopped at the patisserie across the street and stocked up on some amazing pastries to bring back to Dominica for breakfast.

Breakfast was amazing. After eating we relaxed for a while and got ready to face the day. Then, around noon, we took Oreo out for a long walk (between three and five kilometers) up the av du Parc to Parc Mont Royal and took a long walk through the park. Then back to our hotel. Oreo had am amazing time and it was after two when we finally got back.

This walking trip gave us the very first opportunity to try out Dominica’s new Kodak V1003 camera that she just got this week. As soon as we got back from our walk Dominica and Oreo took a nap and sat down and transfered the first few pictures from our trip up to Flickr so that everyone can follow along with us. I have started using Google’s Picasa 2 photo editing software to make cropping and touching up a lot easier. I have used GIMP in the past and it is an amazing program but way too heavy for me. Picasa is very simple and fast for me to just pick up and use. So now I am starting to not post raw images to Flickr but edited images much more of the time.

Dominica slept for about an hour and a half. Then we put Oreo in the car and headed out for a late lunch or early dinner.

We went to Asha but it was four thirty and they don’t open (ouvert) for dinner until five so we took a long walk around the block. While we were walking our friends coming up from Newark called from the customs line on I87 to let us know their status and to make some plans for this evening.

At five we got into Asha and had a great dinner. Dominica has been going crazy wanting Indian for days so this worked out really well. The price was really good too.

After dinner we came back to the hotel room and I took a nap this time and Dominica watched a French language program telling about the making of the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti. Now she wants one. I can’t believe of all the Ferraris that we always talk about – Ferraris being possibly the most beautifully sculpted pieces of serious engineering on the planet – that she picked out the one truly unattractive Ferrari made in the past three decades or more.

A little before nine, when we were supposed to meet our friends out at Bily Kun, we started out walking from the hotel. The bar is far enough away that it is a serious hike but not so far that we could justify not walking. So walk it we did. It took about forty-five minutes to go from our hotel to the bar. We didn’t walk quickly but took a nice, leisurely stroll through some really cool Montreal neighbourhoods along the way. We got up to the district a bit ahead of everyone else so we went to Cafe Noir and got some coffee while we were waiting.

We met everyone around ten and decided to look for a place to eat. We ended up eating at Lychee which was very nice and stayed open late for us which was awesome. After dinner a bunch of people were exhausted and a few weren’t feeling that well so six people, including Dominica, headed for home. Dominica was one of the four that traveled back via a cab. So she was home with Oreo just before midnight.

The four guys who were left went on to Bily Kun where our mission was to try real absinthe which is still unavailable in the United States even though it has been legalized almost everywhere else in the world.  We tried it, at $14 a drink, but we were not impressed.  It really tastes disgusting.  I can’t believe that people get excited about this.

The guys stayed out until the bar closed at three in the morning and then we took the long walk about to the hotels.  It was around four when I finally rolled into bed.

The drive up to Montreal was excellent.  We didn’t get to leave Newark until late – closing in on nine in the evening.  But there was no traffic at all and we made great time the whole way.  In total, the drive time itself was under six hours.  Not a tough trip at all.  Customs was not as friendly as it was back when I was younger but it wasn’t bad.  They didn’t give us a hard time at all.

During the drive we stopped at a rest stop and ate dinner at  Nathan’s which serves fish sandwiches much to our surprise.  They were quite tasty.  We are very glad that we discovered that they have fish as quite often they are an eating option when traveling in New York.

It was around two thirty in the morning when we pulled into Montreal and got to the hotel.  There were some issues with our reservation at check in and we had to switch rooms but we ended up getting upgraded to a business class king room (smoking but we couldn’t tell) that is perfect for Oreo because we are on a high corner with lots of sunlight during the day and windows from two directions so that he can get plenty of sun whenever he wants it.

Strangely, Oreo loves hotels and is very excited to be here.  He really enjoyed the drive too.  He doesn’t get a chance to ride in the Mazda very often and his favorite car seat is in there so he appreciated the change of pace.  Riding in the Mazda’s car seat is like visiting an old friend for our Boston Terrier.  He misses it when he doesn’t ride in it for a while.

The street that we are on is very nice and there are lots of all night businesses here including a 24×7 Werby’s restaurant attached to the hotel which has a very wide menu.  Lots of coffee shops around as well.

It was almost four in the morning before we actually managed to get into bed and start attempting to drift off to sleep.  I set up the laptop and made sure that we were online before going to bed.  The Mazda is parked on the street tonight – making us glad that we didn’t bring the BMW this time – but we should be able to get it into the hotel’s garage in the morning or early afternoon.  It is full for tonight though.

I have to be up by nine in the morning tomorrow to deal with the car before I get a parking ticket (you have to pay after nine.)  So there won’t be a lot of sleep for me tonight.  We are planning on trying out the local Montreal patisseries tomorrow.  That is one of the big draws of this city.  We are very much looking forward to breakfast.