Montreal (Lachine Marina)

Tuesday August 13, 2013

45 25.787 N
73 40.501 W

(We now have direct access to the web ans so I am attempting to catch up the blog with text and photos.) 

Nice backing job

I had underestimated how far we were from downtown Montreal. We looked at the charts last night and concluded it was about 34 miles away and included two large locks on the St Lawrence and some nasty current (6 knots!). So we decided to go about 12 miles to a marina at Lachine and cab it into town. It was an easy two hour run accross XXX Bay and we were secured at the marina shortly after Noon. (It was a very tight back-the-boat-in spot and I did OK, so now I feel a bit better.)

The good news is that they have WiFi and my fancy aerial is picking it up. So we have internet on the boat for the first time since entering Canada. Getting on line I arranged a rental car and hotel reservations in Quebec City

Soon as we had the boat sorted out we walked into town and hailed a cab and headed into Montreal. We had a couple of hours to look around before we picked up the car. (Tony had visited Montreal many times in his career, Deidre and I had been here a couple of times a long time ago.) We wandered around the old city and the dock and were not particularly impressed. About that time the rental car company called and said there were "no cars".

That call created a bit of a battle and eventually they located a vehicle we could have at a suburban office. It was up to us to get there so we all boarded the underground and headed for the suburbs. The vehicle turned out to be a new 4 door pickup, not perfect but workable. We headed back to the boat and ate on board.