O Canada!

Finally, a good excuse for not blogging for over a week. :-) We spent spring break in Montreal, which is a lovely city (I’d move there in a heartbeat) but perhaps not at its finest in early April. Our weather was fairly awful but that didn’t keep us from having a great time.

This is the view from our hotel. From left to right the buildings are Christ Church Cathedral, the Tour de Catedral office tower (built on land that originally belonged to the church), and La Baie (the Hudson Bay Company.) Pretty cool.

Here are my kids (don’t tell them, I promised I’d never put them on my blog) standing at the observation area at the top of Mont Royal. Though my guidebook describes it as a “simple hike up from downtown”, they LIE! When we got to the “250 steps in all, and the last 100 go straight up” I thought I was Going To Die. Luckily the view from the top was worth it and the sun even came out from behind the clouds for a few minutes for us. Plus there was a little shop with a wide selection of ice cream treats. :-)

One way they’ve dealt with the weather in Montreal is by building the Underground City. It’s a network of pedestrian tunnels and shopping malls, all completely underground. Let me tell you, it’s a 13 year old girl’s idea of paradise. There’s even a huge mall that was built under Christ Church Cathedral. I still can’t understand how they pulled that one off. And the strangest thing we saw in the Underground City? In honor of Easter, in one upscale mall they had a petting zoo.

With a llama.

I did manage to sneak in a visit to one of the yarn stores. I’ve never seen a store like it.

There are rows of boxes full of cones of very fine yarns of all types and colors. If you like you can choose up to 12 and they’ll wind them onto bobbins for you. I was more than a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices. They also have a variety that they’ve already blended. One of those really appealed to me, and I decided that I wasn’t likely to do better (at least not in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time, and while my daughter did humor me in visiting a yarn store – not to mention walking 2 miles with only vague directions to find it – I didn’t want to push it. They had 2.5 pounds of the color I liked and assured me that would be enough for a sweater. You will not believe the price. It was $25 Canadian, which works out to just about $22 US. Unbelievable.

Yeah, it’s a little bright. What can I say – I love pink. :-)

And my other favorite purchase? Yarn Harlot’s new book. I hadn’t been able to find a copy at home, and I was inordinately pleased to buy it in her home country. And nothing could be more perfect than spending an evening reading a travel book about knitting while on vacation.