Canada Day 1 (Montreal, Canada): An Inconvenient Flight Schedule, Settling In and A Lot of Food

Today I made my way out from Sacramento to Montreal with a layover in Newark. 

We were scheduled on a red eye with no possible way to get any amount of decent sleep. Our first leg from Sacramento to Newark was a four hour flight with a two hour layover and an hour flight to Montreal. With those flights, it’s time to move by the time you get comfy. Needless to say, I’m running on very little sleep so we’re going to get some words out into the blog-o-sphere and go straight to bed.

Once we got to the ship we got settled and headed to get some food as quickly as possible. The lunch buffet was really good. I had prime rib, roasted veggies and mashed potatoes. I was hoping to get a quick nap in but no such luck. I grabbed some coffee and headed out to town. 

Montreal is nothing like I thought it would be like. I’ve been to British Columbia before and expected to be a little like that but nope! I was completely wrong. It’s extremely European and most everyone’s primary language is French. The architecture definitely has a heavy European influence. If you dropped me off in Montreal without telling me were I was, I would definitely think I was somewhere in Europe. 

We were exhausted so we didn’t spend much time out there today and went back pretty early. Back at the ship we unpacked and lounged around before dinner. 

Dinner was something else today. We’ve traveled with this company before and they’ve always had a pretty loose dress code for dinner so I didn’t pack any slacks or button-downs. Welp, not this time around. When we got to the dining room they allowed us to dine there tonight but we won’t be able to again unless we adhered to the dress code. I’ll be on the look out for fancier clothes as we explore more places around here. If I can't find anything suitable, this might be my last blog about the dining room on this trip. The dinner in the dining room was pretty good but nothing to write home about. I ordered a shrimp cocktail of some sort, a Cesar salad and a beef tenderloin dish that I forgot the name of. Everything was good but, like I said, it wasn’t anything to write home about. Earlier, during lunch, we asked about sushi at the buffet and was told that sushi was going to be put out for dinner. There’s always sushi on these ocean liners. So it was up to the buffet after dinner. The sushi this time around was amazing. The salmon was buttery and the texture was perfect! I always end up eating too much on day one.

While we were out and about earlier today we came across the Cirque Du Soleil: ECHO touring group, a ferris wheel, a crazy medievaly-pirateish themed obstacle course and a few other interesting things. Maybe we’ll go back out, explore and find out more about those things tomorrow.