Montreal - Day 3

Joel had a pretty good night last night. The glitch came this morning when he woke up at 6:10am and we could not get him to go back to sleep. That actually is not very common with Joel. He very rarely wakes up before 7:30am. But today was different! So we were still exhausted so I just stuck Joel between us and he played around a while. Soon enough though, his eyes got heavy and he snuggled right in there. And I got to take probably my favourite picture of all time!


Turns out it was just a short little nap and we were on the road this morning at the same time as usual. On the agenda for this morning was climbing Mount Royal. The guidbook said to take the metro to a certain stop and then walk to an intersection. What it failed to mention was that this intersection was up the biggest, steepest hill I have ever climbed in my life! By the time we got to the intersection for the start of the hike (which was to climb a mountain!) we were sweaty and exhausted already! It's really hard to tell from the picture, but this hill was monstrous!


Adventure number 2 of the hike: the book says that there are two ways to get up the mountain. Take the steep stairs. Or the gradual switchbacks which you can bike, take strollers, etc. Well we get to the start of the hike and they are doing construction and the switchbacks at the start are closed. We almost turned around at the first staircase (which would have been climbing the stupid hill for nothing) but the map indicated if we could just get up this giant staircase, we may be able to walk on the trails for the rest. So Trev managed to push the stroller up this giant hill beside the staircase (which then turned 90 degrees and went up more)!

The walk after that was great and Joel had a 2 hour nap while we were walking (which he really needed!).

Wonderful view at the top!

After our hike was done, we ventured over to the BioDome. The Biodome had 4 different ecosystems. You walk through them and see all the animlas. Joel hated every second of the biodome. The second we walked in there, there was a sign that said that the bird below would walk around. Please don't touch him. But he is friendly. We were in there for 2 minutes and were trying to get a picture with this bird, when we realized that Joel was terrified of this silly bird. He started screaming and was clinging to me with all of his might. For the next hour, he clung to me, even when the bird was out of sight and pretty much cried whenever we tried to point at something. He was scared of beavers and fish and birds and monkeys and pretty much everything else in there. By the end, he calmed down a little bit and rode happily in the stroller again.

This is the moment we realized that Joel is terrified of this bird!

Olympic Stadium (right next to the Biodome)

Last stop of the day was at the Botanical Gardens. Joel had a nice afternoon nap as Trev and I wandered around the different gardens. The Japenese garden was really nice and I enjoyed the lilac garden as well.

And the we metro'd back to our hotel. On the way though we got dinner at Frites Alor! We had to get poutine while we were in Quebec! Yum!