Road Trip

Well the trip is almost over. We're sitting in a Sushi bar in the Byward market in Ottawa. After 3 day 2000 km I'm completely bushed as I write this on my BlackBerry.

Sunday
After a great wedding Saturday I woke up and drove to Kingston, met some friends on the beach for a few hours then off to Montreal. Sushi in Pointe Claire really great, the name of the place is Wasabi and for the past 7 years we alway stop there at least once, then we were off to Laval where we stayed at the Shereton. Pool was great, and since they screwed up our stay the last time the room was free. Nice.

Monday
Meeting went well, once things are confirmed I'll write more. Spent the afternoon in downtown Montreal. Actually ate at the best food court I've ever seen. Looked like an underground Paris market. We ate at a Lebanese place where the chicken was sooooo tender. Boy do people smoke a lot in Montreal. Everyone even 3 year olds puffing away.

Traffic was a disaster. We had to look and some properties to rent in East Montreal for TorontoHomeMovies.com and it took 45 minutes to get out of the traffic and onto the highway.

Quebec

The drive took forever, but hotel was gorgeous (on the outside) it was late after 9 , but we were starving so we went into Old Quebec. Since my family is from the Quebec area, I know it very well. In fact, the restaurant we went to was a place I brought Marianna to the first time we ever visited there. It's call Les Vieux Cannon. The old cannons. There's a long story about how I know the owner and he knows my grandmother, I'll tell it another time. Lets just say, its a place that feels like home. Food is amazing!!! Marianna had lobster and I had salmon.

The next day was spent walking around until I had to drive around looking for the best place to open a new location for THM. Then we drove straight to Ottawa. Yikes.

Ottawa

So all was going fine until we got close to Montreal. We once got stuck in Montreal rush hour traffic for 2 hours and didnt want that to happen again. So I took a by pass. Sort of like the 407 with no toll. The problem was I had no map and kinda had to hope it took us back to the 40 and then onto Ottawa.

I was doing fine. In fact after at the Hotel I saw that had I got off on exit earlier then I would have saved 45 minutes. But as you can guess I didnt. We ended up in a small town just outside Oka. Oka is the place where the Indians there blocked the highway in the 1990s.

Have you ever had something unfortunate happen that turned into something cool? Well the best way to get back to the highway 40 was to take the ferry across. ( See map below)

View Larger Map



What a blast!!! Too bad Isaac was sleeping. The ferry took 4 cars over the lake on a 2 km trip. We got out and it was so warm, and fresh. Definitely the highligh of the summer. And after I asked one guy how to get to the highway he said to follow him, he would take right there. Nice people the french - merci!

So we finally got to our hotel, swam in the coldest indoor pool in history. Next day (today) checked out and went downtown. After business was done, I wanted to show Sammy the portraits by Yosef Karsh. Of course Marianna and I have visited the Hotel Laurier many times and I have a collection of Karsh images that I have purchased over the years. There are 3 main collector of Karsh portraits (I'm not one of them, since a 16x20 goes for over $5000 and a portrait of Winston Churchill is worth over a million) One is the weston family, Shelton Chen a friedn of mine from Avenue rd has of 2 million worth of images and Sherman Hines has a pretty good collection. One day I hope Sammy is collecting my images!!!

Anyhow Road Trip is over. :(