May 20, 2012
Day 1: Air TransAt: Butterflies and Goodbyes
Well it's 6:30 a.m. and we don't actually leave until tonight. Butterflies are an effective alarm clock.
Yesterday featured a last Skype with Avi and Violet from Montana, and we all sat "together" for a long time, us with their cousin Amelia on our knee.
We also made a required visit to Montreal's Atwater Market. This is probably second to the Jean Talon Market, but at this time of year is alive with the most flowers.
Baseline research continues. Here are the fries at Lafleur, the hamburger chain in competition with La Belle Province. At both the fries are hand cut and lovingly precooked so as to soak in oil indefinitely. When fried the second time they come out a rich brown and saturated in oil flavour. Some people hate this. However these are the authentic local French item. We will soon see what the British answer is.
As we prepare to leave, we know that Amelia will be different person when we return in four months. Here she is already training for a potential bike journey, but that will take a few years to organize.
We opened our starter pack of British currency and had another look at it. It is colourful, like Canadian bills, but still of course looks like play money to us. We noticed that the "British" queen is not as old as ours. Clearly they live in the past. Also the backsides of the bills feature important historical figures. Maybe ours do too, but it seems we also put hockey games and native Indian designs.
The crowd at the airport was what you normally expect: crowded. However the Air TransAt line moved quickly and the agent was extremely polite and friendly. The bikes, snug in their travel cases, went through slick as anything. There was no hassle at security, and soon we too were snug in our seats
In this case snug is the real operational word. I have never seen such teeny airline seats. The mechanics of drinking something like an orange juice in a seat like this is not easy, because there is zero elbow room.
Being packed into a sardine can like this for over six hours is something I find very stressful. I was surprised to see that after the ordeal the miscellaneous humans of all ages and sizes filing out of the plane looked ok.
One thing that helped was that TransAt provided not one but two meals in flight, at no charge. They even had free wine, a big incentive for us to learn to like wine! And the lady in the seat next to us was a farmer from the Eastern Townships, near Montreal. We were very much interested in the details of her farm enterprise, not to mention the fact that she had twenty years ago emigrated from near Wales to Quebec, and completely integrated into the French milieu. Our new friend,Gwynneth, extended an invitation to visit the farm next time we are cycling in the vicinity. - the first of hopefully very many new aquaintances from this trip.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 0 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |