Montreal birthday

We've enjoyed a quiet couple of days in Montreal. Yesterday was rather foul day weather wise so we hung out most of the day in our hotel. I've booked us into the Westin Hotel located on the edge of the old town. This was a last-minute decision influenced by a discount the hotel published a week before we began our vacation.

The hotel's most renowned architectural feature is its swimming pool located on the fourth floor. A large section of the pool's base forms a glass roof over the valet parking entrance. We've seen more than one robed person in the lifts clearly determined to swim their way across the heads of arriving guests.

Montreal's old town is appropriately quaint. Many of its old stone buildings have been beautifully perserved and several streets are still cobbled. This is reputedly North America's oldest European founded city (back in 1642).

We wandered the cobbled streets today enjoying sunshine that broke through early in the morning. We even stopped for a hour to toast my mother's birthday in a rooftop bar over lookimg the old port and St Laurence River.

Our afternoon was spent checking out the magnificent Olympic Stadium complex that almost bankrupted the city back in 1976. The site is currently in the midst of an extensive refurbishment, with a dramatic new planetarium currently under construction.

Our day then finished with a tasty French meal in a simple stone building in the heart of old Montreal. We toasted Mum's birthday with superb French wine and ate our fill of pork medallions, venison and filet mignon. Delicious!

Oh yes - one final word of advice for any intrepid traveller planning to hire a car in Montreal. Don't! Driving here is a nightmare. The city operates a completely random one-way traffic system clearly designed to discourage inner-city driving. The urban maze is then magnified by an endless series of construction sites and their accompanying detours. On more than one occasion, I found a ten-minute drive into town transformed into a journey into automotive hell.

Finally, to add insult to injury, many of the city's road markings are worn and thus impossible to follow in the dark.  Try finding them at night during a torrential downpour! If you'll excuse the pun, this system of one-way streets, foul weather and poor road markings was the perfect storm that greeted me last Friday evening when I drove out of the airport in an unfamiliar rental car (on the "wrong side" of the road).  The drive to our hotel will always be remembered as an experience bordering on insanity.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The untold story

When I originally planned this itinerary, I allowed for an extra day in Montreal. I did this part as a potential rest day after an intense whirlwind weekend tour of New York City. Dad was terminally ill; hence, I was unsure if our time in the Big Apple would push the limits. My planning proved prescient. 

On our first morning in Montreal, Mum knocked on my hotel door. Overnight, Dad's legs had swollen dramatically. She'd noticed him rubbing his legs while waiting to board our flight in LaGuardia the previous night. At the time, she pointed out this odd behaviour to me. Hence, the swelling that greeted us the following morning, while shocking, wasn't entirely a surprise.

At first, we thought he was suffering from DVT. I called reception and asked for assistance arranging a doctor's visit. However, the message was never passed on to the appropriate person and hours later I was still chasing reception for a doctor who'd never been contacted. A doctor's visit was hastily arranged (and the hotel ultimately covered the cost as compensation for the oversight).  The GP who attended my father immediately recommended that he be taken to hospital for further testing.

I drove him and Mum to the hospital where a battery of tests was conducted, including a specialist scan the following morning. The hospital eventually concluded that Dad wasn't suffering from DVT. Instead, they decided the fluid retention was caused by tumours affecting his lymphatic circulation. We were told to keep his legs elevated as much as possible, and he was cleared to fly home on the timeline we'd originally planned. Diuretic drugs and regular elevation of his legs saw the swelling diminish progressively in the days that followed.

Mum and I were grateful that we could complete this final holiday without further incident, progressively ticking off more items on Dad's bucket list. This included a visit to Syracuse, New York, a few days later. Here, Dad finally got to see where I lived as an exchange student almost thirty years earlier. Likewise, Dad recovered enough by our second day in Montreal such that we could spend time exploring the city that afternoon before taking Mum to dinner on her birthday.

It would be fair to say the rest day we ended up having in Montreal was not quite the day we'd planned. For several days, I wondered if we'd have to drive across Canada to reduce the number of flights and flying hours Dad would have to endure. I even went so far as to draft a travel plan that would have seen us drive across the entire country in five days or so. I'm glad we never actually had to do this.