Travels with Jackie - Part One
Lacking Steinbeck's convertible and partnered with not a dog but rather a wife who can drive much more ably than the poodle he took with himself in Travels with Charley
Having just done a trip to Munising and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore a few summers ago, we wasted no time in putting the full breadth of the Upper Peninsula behind us in a few hours, crossing the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge—the first of three international toll bridges we’d cross on this trip—over the Soo Locks and the Saint Marys River which ostensibly connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron and entering Ontario at a less than bustling port of entry. After just a couple minutes on the Canadian side of the border checkpoint and the first sprinkling of French courtesy of our border services officer, we were spat out into the third-most populous city in northern Ontario (its roughly 76,000 person Census Metropolitan Area trailing behind Greater Sudbury’s 172,000 and Thunder Bay’s 123,000), a city that frankly feels run down, as though its best days are behind it, though this could owe to how we were routed through the city and onto the Trans Canada Highway.
Highway 17 skirted us along the North Channel of Lake Huron, where we stopped to refuel and eventually hit what we figured would be the last A&W that would be open on our push to Sudbury in Blind River. For non-Doughboys listeners and the other uninitiated, Canadian A&W is wholly separate from the chain as it exists in the United States, as Canadian A&W was spun off from its American counterpart when Unilever bought the Canadian subsidiary in 1972 but has been a corporation controlled by its franchisees since they formed a management group and took over in 1995, since growing the business into the second-largest burger chain in Canada (behind McDonald’s) on the back of a retro approach and a focus on good food.
Jackie had the Buddy Burger combo meal, and I had the Double Buddy Burger combo meal, with each of us choosing their eponymous Root Beer (though screwing up and not electing to go with the frosted mug—a mistake we’d later rectify). Generally, A&W uses its family-themed menu which differentiates its burger patties roughly in order of size as follows: Baby, Mama, Teen, Double Teen, Papa, Uncle, and Grandpa. Each has a designated set of toppings, as does the Buddy Burger, which was the value menu option that comes on an unseeded bun with grilled onions, Teen sauce (a creamy peppercorn aioli from what I can tell), mustard, and ketchup. Jackie liked her burger on this stop more than I liked mine, though I mostly wished my burger was a little heartier, as I’d only had a little gas station food to that point that day, and we’d been up for over 12 hours.
We rolled into Sudbury around 9:30 PM, having lost an hour as we headed east, and settled into a room at the Radisson Hotel Sudbury that I’d booked on my phone a few hours earlier from our booth at A&W. The instant I booked the room, I started to scan reviews for the hotel and grew a bit concerned by some recent ones that were less than glowing, but other than the positively labyrinthine way Google routed us to the hotel (which was very much in downtown) and its wildly confusing parking situation, the hotel was perfectly cromulent, especially at its sub-$100 USD price tag. It was in this room that I discovered Canada’s apparent love for the bizarre “what if Lassie was a K-9 cop” show Hudson & Rex, which ran in repeats for hours straight without a break in the middle of the night, at one point showing up on multiple channels at the same time.
The next morning we drove by the Alex Trebek mural at his alma mater, Sudbury Secondary School before grabbing breakfast quickly at the nearest Tim Hortons. Given the fact that I ordered Ryan’s Scrambled Eggs after seeing an ad with Ryan Reynolds on TV the night before, I can only assume that Canadians eat boxed scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns doused in chipotle sauce with nothing more than their fingers, as no fork was provided.
From Tim’s we headed to Elgin Street, where Little Montreal was about five storefronts away from Sudbury Community Arena, both of which would be extremely recognizable to Shoresy fans. After grabbing photos for posterity, I shamefully flung my breakfast into my gaping maw with my bare hands like an ape, and we made our way back down to the Trans Canada Highway, where we made tracks toward Ottawa.
Now this entire section of the Trans Canada Highway from Sault Ste. Marie to about half an hour outside of what a rational person would consider Ottawa, feels very remote but is quite scenic, pocked with rocky creeks and rivers sluicing their way across the oldest rock at the surface on the continent, the Laurentian Shield, laid bare by glaciers during the last Ice Age, lending an ineffable weight to the drive as the highway wantonly courses through, into, and on top of its Precambrian bedrock. The highway shoots to the north of not-quite-Great Lake Nipissing before dancing along the southern side of the Mattawa River, which joins with the impressive Ottawa River at Mattawa, at which point Québec comes into view, as for most of its run, the Ottawa River forms the border between the massive Eastern Provinces, with Québec coming in at 90% the size of Alaska and Ontario exceeding Texas’s land area by more than 30%.
The five hours from Sudbury east-southeast to roughly the point at which you enter what is apparently Ottawa are quite scenic, but from the point at which you cross into the City of Ottawa, there is nothing resembling a city for what must be at least another dozen kilometers, maybe more. After what was probably an hour of driving after entering “The City” from the northwest, we descended into the city center, battling through patches of complete gridlock at least partially created by what felt like a considerable amount of road construction, eventually getting to our lodging for the night in Lower Town with an exceptionally dodgy block separating our Holiday Inn Express from the more appealing bars and restaurants of the ByWard Market neighborhood.
For dinner, we ate at the justifiably well-reviewed Chez Lucien, where Jack enjoyed her Croque Monsieur and I liked my Chez Lucien Burger, though I’d intended to order the Bourgeois Burger with pear, brie, and sautéed onions and spaced when I ordered, a minor but regrettable mistake on my part. Sitting at the bar, we ended up chatting with two local women who were delightful and were eating on their own. The service and selection at the bar was great, and I was glad to put the shame of finger-food Tim Horton’s behind me. As Chez Lucien was hopping and space seemed to be at a premium, we didn’t stick around for any rounds of drinks past the ones we had with our meal, and we made our way down Murray Street toward Major’s Hill Park, which overlooks the small series of locks at Rideau Canal, which separate the bluff upon which Byward Market gives way to the park from Parliament Hill.
Parliament’s perch above the Ottawa River at Rideau Canal is a striking one, more picturesque than the site of any other seat of government that I can recall. We walked over to the grounds, but we were there after-hours, and the most architecturally impressive portion of Parliamentary complex, Centre Block, had its façade hidden behind scaffolding that’s been there since 2019 and likely won’t be gone for another four years. After wandering around there and at the National War Memorial, we grabbed another drink at a random pub (Aulde Dubliner & Pour House) we passed by, and then made our way back to our hotel, where the cable guide said Game 2 of the Wolves/Warriors series would be playing on one of the Rogers Sports networks. Despite the guide still saying Warriors at Timberwolves was airing, an Ottawa Charge PWHL playoff game was broadcasting across that channel’s airwaves, dashing any doubts as to whether the United States’ monocultural predominance knows a northern bound, as there were other non-NHL hockey games and other random sports on the airwaves over an NBA playoff game in addition to said Charge game.
The next morning, we hit the road. I’d joked about trying to troll Capital Cruises in Ottawa (who I’d trolled as a joke on IG for a while like a decade ago because they had the @capitalcruises handle instead of the business in Austin that I worked for), but I wasn’t feeling it in the morning. I later discovered that they’ve been closed as a business for a couple years now, so any effort to seek them out would have been in vain. We immediately crossed into Québec (our hotel was less than a kilometer from the Ottawa River) and made way toward Montréal.
On the road between Ottawa and Montréal, we tried to stop off at a Tim Horton’s only to have the line at the drive-through be longer than we cared to wait in, and then stopped at a Tim’s another 30km or so down the road. Of course, Jackie wanted me to go through the drive-through, which I didn’t feel great about but didn’t push back on. This was the most out of sorts I felt in all of French Canada. Long story short: if you are a non-French-speaker and can avoid a drive-through, do it. This Tim’s was a little more rural than most, but ordering was a bit of an ordeal.
We also gassed up there, and I feel like I should help Americans traveling in Canada out a bit here. When they ask you to authorize a charge, you won’t get charged for as much as you’re authorizing if you happen to purchase less gasoline than you authorized your card to pay. Petrol prices are also in terms of liters (it’s roughly 3.78 L to a gallon), so just authorize for $100 (Canadian) to make your life easier.
We rolled into Montréal—nearly entirely situated on an archipelago comprised of 234 islands at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers—from the northwest in the rain but midday, and traffic was a nightmare. I was the one of us who drove exclusively in Los Angeles for five years, so I didn’t feel like traffic in Montréal was the worst I’d seen or anything, but the gridlock was real, and once we got off the highway and into Downtown and Mont Royal up to Mile End, where we ended up heading to take in St-Viateur Bagel (cash only, with an ATM inside the original location), it felt like we’d entered a lawless zone where anyone would double-park in an active lane of traffic with no warning, feeling a bit like New York but without horns being honked at the people holding up proceedings.
The bagels at St-Viateur are every bit as good as the world would have you believe (Americans can order them through Goldbelly). We got four of the All Dressed (Everything, for American readers) with a Philadelphia Cream Cheese, and without heating them up via a toaster or whatever, these bagels were amazing. The cream cheese was also decidedly different (read: better) from the product stateside, so there are clearly different laws with regard to food standards in Canada that helps improve the experience.
We went to St-Viateur and then had to kill a couple hours before we could check into our bed-and-breakfast a couple blocks from the Bell Centre. We ate some bagels overlooking a foggy and soggy Montréal, and just as we’d left Mont Royal to head back across the McGill grounds toward our lodging, Jackie got a phone call pushing the chance of upgrading to a suite with a jacuzzi from the much smaller room we’d originally reserved for $120 CAD. On the phone, she passed, but I’d just pulled out $200 CAD at St-Viateur, and I worked in service long enough to know that we were getting a helluva deal of which I hoped the staff at the B&B were getting a huge chunk.
The B&B was less than a block from the Lucien-L'Allier subway station in the densely built up Downtown adjacent neighborhood of Ville-Marie but was on an oddly residential block-long stretch in the heart of a business district. If we’d had a better idea of how to navigate the city and what we were looking for, this would have been an ideal location from which to explore the city. However, we were just there for one rainy day, so after settling into our suite upgrade, we headed out on foot to the waterfront and then to the Wolf & Workman Free House, which looked good per Google Reviews, getting seated next to an Indian engineering professor living in Illinois with whom we commiserated about the woeful state of the country the lot of us found ourselves refreshingly out of for the moment.
The food and chat was great, after which Jack and I headed over to Notre-Dame Basilica, took a gander, grabbed a bottle of wine from a nearby liquor store, and made our way back to the B&B in the rain, where I threw on Toast of Tinseltown while Jack took a load off in the jacuzzi without turning the jets on, depriving herself of the joy of the full rumble because—as this coupled with her being married to me—she’s a masochist.
Saturday was another day spent almost entirely in the rain.
After getting the second titular ‘B’ offered from our lodging the next morning, we tracked down a sports gear store mysteriously in the basement of a hotel a few blocks away, where I snatched up a fitted tri-color Expos hat and Jack grabbed a dope throwback-style sweatshirt to memorialize the team MLB stole from the City of a Hundred Steeples. We then checked out and randomly drove around Montréal toying with going to Jean-Talon Market but getting out there only to deem it not worth the hassle it was going to be to try to park near there on a Saturday morning when we were just going to spend the bulk of the rest of the day in the car. We meandered around aimlessly for another couple hours, eventually driving around Île Saint-Hélène for a bit, checking out the half of Jean-Drapeau Park that housed the Biosphere which was constructed for the Expo 67 World’s Fair along with the entire island next to Saint Helen’s, Île Notre Dame, which was filled in for the fair and is home to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, the home of the Canadian Grand Prix which happened a few weeks ago.
After the park, we made our way toward Québec City, known to French speakers as Québec sans the City modifier with the usage for the province modified with the article ‘le’ preceding it in French. Along the way, we stopped for a quick bite at a Tim Hortons off the Trans Canada Highway, this time actually going in, ordering at a screen and mercifully letting me off the hook from trying to order via the drive-thru in broken, horrible French.
Our coffee and light lunch tided us over until we pulled into Québec—which I’ll just call Québec for the next few paragraphs—in the afternoon rain, checking into Hôtel du Vieux-Québec taking our bags up, and then parking the car at the underground structure up the street at City Hall. The parking had in-and-out privileges, but we didn’t really need them, as we were staying in the heart of Old Québec, where we’d spend the bulk of the next two days. It was here where we met up with Jack’s family, first meeting up with her sister and sister’s husband who’d gotten there the night before, grabbing a few rounds at the bar before meeting up with Jack’s parents, who rolled in a couple hours after us, having had to come all the way from Ottawa that day.
We spent much of the next few days eating and drinking, so I’ll just give the highlights here. Old Québec was beautiful and kind of brainmelting. After finding a spot to set up shop in 1534, Jacques Cartier first attempted to establish a French fort there in 1541, but they were cowed away by the harsh Canadian winter after a year, and the 400 French settlers abandoned the settlement. Samuel de Champlain returned to the area in the summer of 1608, making it the second-oldest European settlement in Canada, accentuated by only fortified city walls north of Mexico in the New World. Set against bluffs which it’s carved into and then built atop the plateau, Old Québec is the clear hub of what was the largest city in Canada until late 18th Century.
Le Château Frontenac is the striking heart of the Old Québec skyline that looms over the St. Lawrence, with the Dufferin Terrace (a broad wooden sidewalk dating back to 1879) overlooking the lower section of Old Québec, Basse-Ville (Lower Town), with the two connected by le Funiculaire du Vieux-Québec, a funicular first built in 1879 though since rebuilt after being wiped out by a fire, setting two small theoretically counterweighted railcars opposite one another on a 59.4-meter track at a 45-degree angle. People who know me, know I LOVE a good funicular, and this is a serious draw when you are faced with the prospect of humping it back up those steep stone sidewalks back to Haute-Ville (Upper Town) after eating and drinking for hours in Basse-Ville.
Bars and restaurants I dug in Basse-Ville: Pub Borgia, Terroir - Vins et Compagnie, and especially Pub L’Oncle Antoine, where the staff were fantastic and the vibes were positively cavernous. Great space for a bar.
Bars and restaurants I liked in Haute-Ville: Le Bedeau (had the best meal we had in Canada here—the beef hanger steak was so succulent and the truffle potato press was maybe the best presentation of potatoes I’ve ever had; the cocktails were great too), Bar Les Yeux Bleus (smelled TERRIBLE if you within five feet of wherever that sulfurous smell was emanating from at the front door, but great vibes as long as you left before the DJ started spinning awful tunes), and Pub St-Alexandre, which was a passable Irish pub.
I’m sure there were other places I’ve forgotten in the interim that I liked, but these were the standouts. I should also mention that those staying at Hôtel du Vieux-Québec (which is carbon-neutral) have access to a lounge where you can make your own espresso drinks at their espresso machine and where you can refill your complimentary in-house glass water bottles with their filtered tap water. I didn’t have to pay for a coffee for three days. And I was having more than one americano a day. The rooms were great on their own, but these complimentary amenities mattered to me and positively affected our stay.
If we’re being completely honest, as Americans who can’t help but look around and wonder, could my life be better here, Québec City was the place we visited in Canada that seemed most appealing if we were to have to relocate to another country. It was wholly appealing, and as much as I want to explore more of Montréal, I find myself wanting to go back to Québec City.
After a few days in Québec, we got up, hit a bookstore and coffee shop, and made way for the first border checkpoint back into the US.