# Montreal, Quebec, Canada -- Day 2

Source: https://sumnerevans.com/posts/travel/2016-new-england-trip/2016-06-05-montreal-2/
Published: 2016-06-05
Categories: New England Trip
Tags: Canada, Montreal, Quebec, Travel, Underground City

Today we rode the entire hop on hop off circuit and walked around the Montreal
underground city.

### Tim Hortons

For breakfast we decided to go to Tim Hortons. It’s the thing to do in Canada. I
got a coffee. Because that’s what you do at Tim’s.

![Cup of Tim Hortons coffee](images/tim-hortons.jpg)

### Hop on Hop Off Bus

It was raining very hard as the weather report predicted so we didn’t want to do
anything outside. (We were extremely glad that we’d done all of the outside
stuff yesterday.) The hop on hop off bus was a double decker bus with an open
top, but the bottom was covered. We had to walk to the bus stop though, and we
got pretty wet doing so.

The tour guide was quite a character. He was very knowledgable about both
Canadian and American history and he tied the two together in a way I’d never
heard. The Eastern provinces of Canada have a lot of history in common with the
New England states. They were all originally British colonies so when the
American colonies declared independence, many American politicians expected the
Canadians to join them. Benjamin Franklin spent a long time in Canada attempting
to encourage the Canadiens (French Canadians) to join the Patriot cause. In an
attempt to throw the British out of the Province of Quebec and win the French
people for the Revolutionary Cause, the Continental Amry invaded Quebec.
Montreal was taken and for a few months it was an American city. The invasion
ultimately failed outside of Quebec City when a blizzard inflicted huge losses
for the Americans who were dressed in summer uniforms.

Since we’d done portions of the bus circuit yesterday, our guide didn’t tell us
much new, but he was very funny. There was a lady behind us who was on her phone
the entire time. Her phone was whistling all the time from texts and she didn’t
ever silence it. Eventually the guide came up and was like “you don’t need this
tour, you could have stayed home” and she still didn’t stop. Whenever her phone
would whistle, he would imitate it in the microphone.

### Underground City

Once the tour was done, we went back into the tourist information center to be
dry. We had heard that Montreal has an “underground city” so we tried to figure
out how to get to said underground city. We ran into a few ladies that we’d met
one evening on the cruise ship. We’d ran into them again in Montreal at Mass and
then we saw them again at the visitor information center. It was very amusing
that we ran in to them so many times. All that was to say that the pointed out
that on a certain map there is a blue underlay which shows the underground city.

Essentially the underground city is just a series of basements connection to
each other via tunnels. (Actually, a lot of it is actually above ground, but it
is all inside which is what we wanted because we did not want to go out in the
rain.) The area we went down into was one of the busiest areas of the
underground city. It was like the size of all of the malls in Denver combined
and it was busy! We walked around a bit and then grabbed a bite to eat in one of
the biggest food courts ever. There were probably 15 vendors in the food court.
The whole area was very impressive.

Our hotel isn't part of the underground city but there was a building only a
block away from our hotel that was part of the underground city.  Not wanting to
go out into the rain, we decided to walk all the way around to that building in
the underground city. The main part of the underground city is in the shape of a
U. We started at the top of the left side and went all the way around to the
middle of the bottom side.  It was very out of the way (especially considering
we got lost a couple times).

After leaving the top part of the left side of the U, the underground city was
not nearly as nice. It was mainly just a walkway that connected some building’s
basements to each other. It was a bit odd because we were basically the only
people walking in the passageways. We emerged from the underground city and
walked the block to our hotel and called it a day. I dealt with a few things on
my computer and we checked in to our flight to Atlanta. We are going to fly to
Atlanta tomorrow and rent a car. Hannah is down there already with family so we
are going to pick her up and visit some friends and family in Georgia.

This will conclude my coverage of our trip. It was an awesome trip full of
history and I really enjoyed spending time with mom. I will be writing some more
posts about my overall thoughts on the trip and the individual places we went,
but I have no timeline for that.