The electrical work for our interior house update is finished. There are several large holes in the ceilings and walls for the drywall repair guy to fix, but the wiring is in and we have most of the new light fixtures. The others will arrive during the painting process and will be ready to install when the paint is dry. After the electrical team left the house, we had two full days (insert sarcasm here) to prepare for our 18-day cruise from Montreal Canada, down the St. Lawrence River, then down the eastern Canadian/U.S. coastline, and into New York City.

We had an early start for the cruise–we had to be at the airport by 5:00 a.m. for our flight to Charlotte, then to Montreal. That wasn’t the shortest route, but the airlines didn’t ask us for input when they planned their routes.

We were expecting something like the cartoon above, but our STL->CLT flight was called on time. We learned quickly that we shouldn’t be too confident. During the CLT->YUL boarding process, an oxygen mask dropped from its overhead storage for no apparent reason. A mechanic was called, but the mask wouldn’t retract and required a major repair. The plane was only half full, so the solution was to move the passenger from that seat to another seat with a properly working (and retracted) oxygen mask. That was a 30-minute delay and made our flight more typical of air travel these days. With the ArriveCAN app, passing through Canadian customs was a breeze. We collected our baggage and joined the Viking cruise folks, who took our group to our hotel. After checking in, Ted and I immediately took a three-hour nap, then hit the streets to explore Montreal and to look for some dinner.

We didn’t see a lot of restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the hotel, and we were only a few blocks from McGill University, so we asked some of the hundreds of always-hungry college students milling around where we could eat. A wonderful couple said they were just heading for the 3 Brasseurs, and invited us to go with them. What a place! In English, that’s the 3 Brewers and it was a brewpub. I think everything on the menu had beer in it somewhere: beer-battered fries, blueberry beer pie, beer buns (made with what’s left of the malt after brewing the beer), etc. We had such good burgers (“smothered in maple beer sauce”) and such a good dessert (caramel sauce-covered cinnamon rolls made with beer butter in the sauce), that we went back for a lunch pizza the next day. You might drool as you look at the photos of our caramel sauce cinnamon rolls and our pizza.

The Brasseurs also serve beer in a five-liter “Triton,” but only to groups of five or more people.

After dinner, we walked around for awhile (five miles clocked on my pedometer today) and then crashed in our room and slept for more than ten hours. We’ll be more alert tomorrow.