I needed to get from Toronto (actually Brampton) to Montréal airport to pick Rob up at 4:30.
I also wanted to see Parliament Hill, since I was going to drive within an hour of it on the way.
I did the calculations- if I wanted an hour to see Parliament Hill, then I needed to leave no later than 8am. That’s easy, since I normally go to bed around 1 am or so and wake up between 5:30 and 6am. No alarm needed, yay!

But I was le tired after all those G-forces the day before and hit the sack around 12:30am… and didn’t wake up until 7am! Best night’s sleep I’ve had in months. Yay. But that meant a bit of a scramble to get checked out and on the road. I had packed the night before, so I was able to head out around 7:30am, which gave me a bit of wiggle room on time.

I hooked up my phone to the CarPlay in the rental, told it to get me to Parliament Hill, then told Siri to “play songs that I would like”.

Siri knows my musical tastes pretty well. Many years of telling him, “Siri, I like this” and “Siri, I don’t like this” has given him a pretty good idea of my tastes. So the playlist is about 2/3 songs that I listen to often and about 1/3 new music that Siri thinks I’ll enjoy. (I’ve used “he/him” for Siri a few times, so I should let you know that my Siri is set to a male voice with a British accent.) The first song up was “Browns” by Pete and Bas and that one is multi-layered with complex rhyme schemes and lots of wordplay. Someday, I’ll have to give that one a full breakdown like I did with Sindhu Sesh.

I stopped at a couple of those travel centres on the way to load up on coffee. “Elbows Up” is still a thing here, as is evidenced by the crowd at Tims vs the slow day at BK.

Before I knew it, I was in Ottawa trying to find a place to park the car. I had almost 90 minutes to see the sights, which was more than enough.

Now, I’ve been to Washington DC. I’ve seen the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument… but nothing in that town gets even close to the grandeur of the buildings on and around Parliament Hill.

The main building was getting a facelift, but no matter. The other buildings in the area were plenty beautiful.

…except the Supreme Court building. That thing is fugly. What were they thinking?

Before heading back to the car, I stopped at Brixton’s British Pub and had a pint. This is just a few blocks from where Pete and Bas will be playing on November 1, so I had a pint and gave them an early toast.

That’s another thing that changed for me after meeting them. I’ve always hated beer. But in the green room with the boys, there was free beer in the fridge, since the venue was a brewhouse. I discovered that I actually quite like a pint, particularly an ale with a hint of citrus and a face-shattering wallop of bitterness. But I’m still very, very new at this, so when I ordered from this pub, I asked for something “bitter, with a hint of citrus” and ended up with a Flying Monkey IPA. And yeah, it was really nice. I did some people-watching , then headed back to the car for a bit of an early start to the Montréal airport.

Turns out, that was a good idea, as the whole area around the airport was gridlocked. Even though I arrived to the airport at 3:30, I didn’t get to park until 4:24. Crazy. Found Rob at the baggage carousel and we waited an hour and 26 minutes for the bags to be unloaded. Not impressed with the airport here. At all.

Got to the hotel and did a quick checkin. The room is HUGE, clean and comfy.

Included with the stay are two complimentary drinks at happy hour. As it was almost at the end of happy hour when we arrived, there was a bit of a backup at the bar!

We decided to head outside the hotel for dinner and found a cute little Mexican place just around the corner.

Reading a Mexican food menu in French is a riot. Luckily, there were English translations in tiny print below the French. Luckier still, I could usually tell what it was by reading the Spanish name of the item at the top. Rob got chicken flautas and I got tacos pollo pastor. We both thought the flavours were really nice, but the textures were off. Rob’s flautas were a little gummy and my tacos were fried too much to be soft, but not enough to be crispy. Weird. Still, the flavours were nice and the chips & salsa were free when you sat down at the table, just like God intended. That salsa was really good, too!

Right now, my Houston peeps are cringing at the radishes and feta cheese on tacos al pastor. But hey, that’s way better than the enchiladas I got in Calgary one time that were drenched in a tomato-basil sauce. That bowl of rice was excellent, too, especially when drizzled with any of the sauces that came with our dishes. They really knocked it out of the park with those sauces. The green tomatillo one was nice and tart, the pineapple/jalapeño one was nice and spicy and the red one was… red. If you know Mexican food, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s red sauce. It was good.

Big day for me tomorrow.

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