Day 5 - Toronto to Montreal

Having visited the pool the night before, we were ready to hit the road right after breakfast. Breakfast is included at Hampton Inns and this is pretty good as we all get a good start of the day.

We left Toronto at about 10:30am for our 338 mile drive to Montreal. Montreal is the furthest we will get into Canada. In addition, today is the last large distance we will be traveling in one day; every other "leg" of the trip is going to be smaller than what we have covered so far.

The GPS unit has been very good so far... We have a million jokes about the tone the female voice of the unit has when she says: "recalculating"... and we made her recalculate a few times so far! A fun part was today when we decided to stop at a Wal-Mart to get a couple of pillows for the kids to have in the care for the long rides. So as we had already set our destination for Montreal, we asked the GPS lady to find the closest Wal-Mart to our current location. It turned out that we had to go back a couple of miles for the closest Wal-Mart and once we got there, purchased what we needed and resumed our route, she somehow decided (this is more probable a user error) that we had not yet reached the Wal-Mart we were targeting, so once we got on the road, she got in a frenzy of "when possible make a U-turn" instructions... We had to reset the destination to the hotel in Montreal for her to relax...

During this leg of the trip - specifically at exit 538 on 401 East (close to Belleville :-)) - we hit 1,000 miles of our trip!

We stopped at a very interesting place for a late lunch. It was called "Shoeless Joe's" - go figure -, a bunch of police officers were just leaving the place as we were going in, and it had a really great menu! It was a sports Grill type place and the service and food was excellent.

Pretty close to Montreal we crossed from Ontario to the providence of Quebec. Talk about a cultural shock! The moment we crossed the providence lines, all signs were in French; not French and English, just French! Thankfully GPS continued to speak in English :-) and got us more or less (some Margie finesse required) to our final destination around 6:00pm.

We spent the rest of the evening settling in and taking it a bit easy. We have not settled on the places to see in Montreal yet; we are researching! We want to see the Olympic village for sure; the rest will be a surprise when I update the blog again :-)