Tunnel Vision

June 15-17

After a big lunch on Thursday, we weren’t ready for a full dinner, so we went to the old part of Brockville to the Keystorm Pub to have a couple of appetizers.

Joanna started with French onion soup with Swiss, not bad but not French onion, either. That needs Gruyere, baked over the side of the bowl.

I suggested the baked Brie, which came with candied walnuts, cranberry chutney, and garlic bread. I could have done without the garlic, but otherwise it was perfect.

The draft selection was OK, but not great.

I had three pints: 

MacKinnon Brothers Cross Cut blonde ale contains 5.2% alcohol but tastes stronger. The flavor has a hint of sweet and is a bit light. It’s not outstanding, but still OK.

Molson Stock Ale, a Canadian mainstream commercial product, tastes much like a lager but avoids the lager aftertaste. It’s made by Molson Coors in Ontario. This isn’t like making love in a canoe, maybe a rowboat instead. It’s not quite as close to water as other Coors products.

Lagunitas is not one of my top IPAs, but it's a solid option nonetheless. Sometimes it hits me as having too much citrus, possibly from citra hops rather than from added fruit. According to Lagunitas, it’s brewed “with 43 different hops and 65 various malts.” I don’t know if they’re serious about that.

Friday, we started our meandering in Courthouse Square. There’s a cross street behind the courthouse called Jail Street. 

There are also a few interesting churches besides the 19th century courthouse.

The figure of Justice on top of the courthouse is a replica of the original, which was carved of cedar. Somehow Justitia in Brockville has picked up the nickname “Sally Grant.” Nobody seems to know why.

For lunch, just for the hell of it, we stopped at Cosies English Tea Room. It serves scones and sandwiches that I guess are associated with English high tea. I had one with cheese and Branston pickle. 

The pickle is not cucumber cured in brine, but pickle more in the sense of chutney or relish. It is a sweet-and-savory mix of fruit and other things. It was fun to try, but like chicken feet, not something I’m going to do very often.

Joanna had a tuna and cheese toastie, an open sandwich with cheese melted in an oven. 

The shop is decorated in old furniture bought from the Habitat for Humanity thrift store. Maybe the ladies’ room too.

Near the east edge of town is Fulford Place, an imposing stone mansion built by a Canadian senator named Fulford. He was also a druggist who marketed “pink pills for pale people.”

The house overlooks the St. Lawrence River from a terraced lawn punctuated by venerable maples. The grounds were designed by the Olmstead firm.

A small formal garden has marbles of Adam and Eve. When we were there, the poppies and peonies were out in force.

And bees were in the roses.

Next we backtracked to a riverside park that used to be a railroad depot. It is at the south end of what Brockville claims is Canada’s first rail tunnel, built in the mid 19th century.

The tracks have been paved with a concrete walkway. On either side of the path are strings of colored lights. Every once in a while, a stretch of red light zooms down the tunnel to the sound of a locomotive whistle.

Sometimes the walls are green, sometimes blue. You get the idea.

It’s where Joanna caught the shot of the day.

Water is constantly dripping, by design. If the tunnel didn’t leak, the buildup of ground water would collapse it.

The drips leave streaks on the walls much like those in a cavern, but for some reason, the deposits build up faster in the tunnel than they do in a natural cave, about a millimeter a year, the sign said.

Walls are streaked with red and green from trace minerals, mainly iron and copper. At some places along the tunnel, the walls are covered with cascades of deposits, maybe calcium, that look like icing.

Dinner was an experimental burger at the Union Jack, an English-style pub that got my attention partly because it has signs for Old Speckled Hen and Hobgoblin in the windows. And also because the front is painted flag blue.

The burger was made of brisket and served with some kind of sweet-sour chutney. It was different, but I won’t do that again. Joanna opted for some surprisingly good grilled salmon.

The Hen was good, as always, and the Goblin even better.

I led Joanna across the street to the Georgian Dragon where I had a pint of White Water IPA for dessert. It’s a very fragrant ale, with good hops and some malt on the end.

Next morning it was time to go to Montreal.

Somehow Google gave me directions that included a highway under construction so I couldn’t get there from here.

Just about the time I was sure that I was on the wrong road, orange signs started showing up with arrows for the Rue Sherbrooke detour. 

That was convenient. I actually know something about Rue Sherbrooke and how it fits into downtown Montreal. We went there last year to the art museum.

Once we got out of the bumper-to-bumper traffic and were on Sherbrooke, I spent a few minutes parked by the curb to compare the tourist map of the city with the Google printout. 

Once I figured it out, we drove quite a way on Sherbrooke to turn right on Rue Peel. A few blocks downhill, we turned left onto Boulevard Rene Levesque. Hotel Travelodge was maybe a half kilometer from there.

I would have preferred to put us up at the Holiday Inn, where we stayed last time. Its feng shui, after all, was assured by an expert consultant. Can’t beat that.

But when I tried a couple of weeks in advance, the hotel was already full.

The Travelodge is a block away, still on the edge of Chinatown and near the Old City. The room’s tiny but otherwise it’s OK. Holiday Inn Centre-Ville is still my first choice for Montreal.

A Google search for French restaurants in Montreal turned up fewer in midtown than I expected. There is one we have visited a couple of times, La Gargote, on Place d’Youville in the Old City. 

There was also one that looked very promising, La Maison du Magret, three blocks away from the hotel. It specializes in duck. 

We sat at a table near a mirror runs the length of one wall. On it is a passage from a La Fontaine fable. The letters looked like they were written in lipstick and stretch too far to be read easily when you’re sitting up close. 

I did make out one bit, about a stork who marched on his long red legs and spoke Egyptian.

Actually, that bit read: “la cigogne marchait sur ses longues jambes rouges et parlait egyptien … .” It wasn’t till I looked it up that I learned that a cigogne isn’t a swan but a stork. The fable is “The Ugly Duckling.”

After we ordered, the waitress brought a complimentary plate of foie gras with coarse and wonderful bread.

Joanna’s duck confit was excellent. The skin was crisp. She shared some with me and ate some of teh skin herself—almost unheard-of for Joanna.

I had the magret, for which the place is named. It consisted of thin medallions of rare duck breast. It was terrific. So were the fried potatoes and grilled vegetables.

Both dishes, Joanna’s and mine, came with a mild foie gras sauce.

If you’re near downtown Montreal, you don’t want to miss this place. If you’re a vegan, you may want to take the day off. This was tear-jerkingly good food.

I had two glasses of a Pays d’Oc cabernet de cabernet. Never heard of that before. I don’t think it was a typo for sauvignon because I heard the waitress say the name and it tasted nothing like cabernet sauvignon.

It was slightly acidic, fragrant, and fairly full bodied.

She brought a merlot-cabernet blend for Joanna that had less bite than mine, but still carried plenty of flavor.

Next morning at breakfast, we ran into the Iranian robotics team. We saw other teams during the day in the hotel and on the streets in the neighborhood.

There seems to be some kind of gathering, probably a competition. I think they're in town for RoboCup, a competition of soccer-playing robots, which is being held at the Palais de Congres, across the street from the Holiday Inn.

That may explain why Holiday Inn was booked solid. It could be filled with nerds in team jerseys. 

Nerds always have more fun.

After breakfast, we tried something new. We took the Metro to the Pie-IX station to see the botanical gardens, which are near the Olympic Park, which dates back to the 1970s.

Pie IX is the name of a boulevard northeast of us. Google says the name refers to Pope Pius IX.

We got there easily with the help of the lady at the Metro ticket booth.

Most of the Montreal botanical garden is a formal layout. The bit we saw is heavy on annuals, different arrangements planted each year.

We didn’t feel like paying $20 each to see another formal garden, no matter how big. We walked around the plantings outside the fence, and that was enough.

This is the Great White North, but even so, temperatures were in the high 80s. It was time to duck out of the sun. So we made for the bar to have a muffin and a beer.

One of the taps was labeled Juke Box. When I heard it was an IPA, that settled it.

I’ve looked it up and am not sure but believe that it is brewed by a Montreal company called Oshlag. Two other taps at the gardens bar were labeled “Oshlag.”

Juke Box is spectacular. It has a rich bitter flavor, and the fragrance from the hops is downright floral.

I wouldn’t drive all the way to Montreal just to get it, but the next time I see it, I’ll buy a pint.

We got back to the hotel in one piece and took a break.

Then we set out on a journey around the corner for dinner in Chinatown. We walked up and down. There are a lot of shops that are heavy on dumplings and noodles—which are good, but not what we were in the mood to eat.

I had wanted snake soup, but Joanna said it is a winter dish and probably not available. We didn’t see any signs advertising it.

We wound up at a spot on the very edge of Chinatown on Rue Gauchetiere. It’s called Mon Nin, Cantonese for 10,000 Years.

They brought us soup with pork and dried bok choy as a starter. It was pretty tasty.

Then came my dish. It was described as snails in black bean sauce. In French it was “escargots.”

But this is a lot of work. The snails are much smaller than the ones cooked in escargots Bourguignon. 

They’re sauteed in black bean sauce, as advertised, but also in the shell. So to get at the meat, you have to hold each slippery shell in your fingers and pick the snail out with a small wooden skewer.

I’ve never met a snail I didn’t like. So this was very tasty. But it took so long to get a dozen or so snails out of the shell, that by the time I was halfway through them, they were cold.

Joanna had a dish of salty pork with preserved egg. It was delicious over rice. It had added appeal because it didn’t come stuck inside a shell.

I had a Tsingtao with dinner, and then we went for a walk.

It was getting late and we were getting tired, so we didn’t wander far.

I managed to pick up a couple of pints at an IGA near the hotel. They were a red ale and a session IPA from a Montreal brewer called St. Ambroise. 

Both were very good. The red was rich and malty without being sweet. The IPA had the fine pine flavor and some perfume, although less than this afternoon’s Juke Box.

I came back and worked on this report before I conked out. I’m finishing it up on Monday morning.

We move on to Trois Rivieres on Tuesday and will stay there a couple of days before we go to Quebec City.

Be well, all, and when you’re in a tunnel, don’t forget to duck.

Harry

June 17

That’s a really really great photo, Harry!

Tell Joanna it’s better than I could do!

On my bucket list is one more road trip with you!

Best

Art