April 30, 2014
Day 1: Montreal to Paris
Public transport in Montreal has been a pleasure to use. The "747" bus linking the city with the airport runs frequently and costs only $10. Regular city busses are frequent and seem to run on time, and the subway (Metro) is super fast. On the Metro there is provision for bikes, too. The only glitch is that access to the Metro uses long stairs or escalators, such that disabled people or lone parents with kids in strollers are just plain shut out.
For us, getting back to the airport was easy as pie. Of course, we had paid $95 to store the bikes out there, so it was just us and the duffel bags. The 747 bus had room for luggage, but it was crowded and trying to take the bikes on it would have been a trial for everyone.
At the Air Transat check-in, despite repeated promises as we repeatedly checked with them, they had no bicycle bags. However, they did have wheelchair bags, and two of these per bike did the trick. (We could not really use our previous Westjet bags, since Westjet had done such a good job of ripping them up in the trip fromm Victoria.
At the oversized baggage check-in they were glad we had not sealed up the bikes, since they had to open up all the under seat, under rack, in front of seat tube, and hanging from the handlebar bags that wre had on there. We think by rights they could have invoked a rule that only the bare bikes could go in the bags, but they were in fact content to just rip everything apart.
Passing security for us personally went well too. The lineup was amazingly long, snaking up and down and back again in a long corridor, but in fact it moved along quite well. We had of course now hidden our dangerous plastic hammer in the checked luggage, and they forgot to accuse Dodie's nail file of being a knife. They even failed to identify my spare camera battery as a hazardous lithium product!
Beyond security I finally came to realize that we are well and truly free of the food purgatory that we found in the southern USA. They even had real bagels out here at the airport! And in a jiffy (more or less) we will be in Paris. Hooray!
Photos coming ... gotta board now
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