Bonjour Montréal!

Writing a quick blog post while travelling solo is a bit of a tradition for me. I'm sitting on VIA Rail train #62 just west of Coteau station waiting for the westbound #35 to pass before we proceed. I guess it should be Gare de Coteau since I'm in Quebec now.

The train should arrive in Montréal by about 2:00 P.M. which is about 20 minutes late, but in the grand scheme of things, that's pretty decent. Once I get off the train, I plan to hope on the new Réseau express métropolitain (REM) train and ride out to Brossard and back. I really thought that I would have ridden the Crosstown LRT in Toronto before the REM, but here we are.

The point of this little trip is to getaway from work and just to relax a bit. The train ride is a great way to start for me. I enjoy the ride on VIA and Montréal is a nice distance away from home. It's a different enough city to make it feel like I've escaped Toronto, but close enough that it's a decent enough trip to do with just one night in the hotel between the two train rides.

Later this year, I might do a same-day run out to Ottawa (on VIA Rail) to ride the O-Train. That assumes they can keep the thing running over the winter. They didn't exactly hit a home run with that transit system.

More later...