Bonjour Montréal: Our First Day

September 4, 2012 By Leanne Vogel December 26, 2018

The last moments that we spent with my family were the hardest. I cried, and smiled, laughed, and cried again. It was quite the emotional roller coaster. Instead of keeping strong and pushing myself through this change, I’ve been letting myself feel everything. When I’m sad, I cry. When I’m happy, I smile. Better to just get it all out than force it back, if you ask me.

Letting myself feel my emotions resulted in a lot of family squinches, as my Mom calls them – where the four of us hug each other at the same time, as tight as can be. We did a lot of squinches as a kid. It feels different when you’re taller than your parents, but still feels just as comforting.

I’m going to miss them, but I’m still happy that we’re doing this. This move will be good for my soul.

We gave Lexy a dose of pills that would make her travels a bit easier and dropped her off at Air Canada Cargo. It was hard to leave her, but we knew she was in capable hands. Pebbles came along with us on the flight and was as well behaved as we could have ever hoped for. It’s as if she’d grown up flying. She slept, didn’t whine, or fuss, it was fabulous!

If you look hard, you can see her little beady eyes in there…

The take off felt final – no turning back, this is it, you’re actually doing this, type of final. I shook, cried hysterically, and said goodbye to the prairies.

The 4 hour flight went by rather fast. I kept my mind distracted by watching What to Expect When You’re Expecting and The Lucky One, and reviewing all of the changes we are making to our new house this week.

Oh yes, and of course I snacked!

For lunch – leftover rosemary yam fries, cooked chickpeas and roasted vegetables.

For snack – roasted seaweed. Don’t knock it till you try it, this stuff is the BOMB! Even Kevin likes it… which is saying a lot because he hates most all ‘hippy loving green things’, as he calls them.

Because our flight was massively delayed, we arrived in Montreal about 2 hours later than expected, at 8pm.

We waited for our bags, picked up our rental mini van, and raced off to grab Lexy at the cargo hold. I’ve never been so excited to see the little stink. She was scratching at the door of her crate and so excited to see us.

We had planned to hit up Walmart on our way to our new place to grab pillows, food and water, but to our surprise… Walmart and many other stores close at 5pm on Sundays. Weird.

We managed to find a little corner store that was still open and stocked up on:

• pickles
• canned mushrooms
• canned green beans
• apples
• bananas
• tuna
• water

Thank goodness I brought some food with us. When we got to our new place, I made an apple bowl for me with apples, cinnamon, raisins and coconut butter, and a tuna bowl for Kevin with tuna, pickles, and mushrooms. I chose not to crack open the green beans until the morning. There’s nothing quite like canned green beans at 5am in the morning, I’ll tell ya that.

We got back to the house really late, ate, blew up our awesome ThermaRest mattresses, and passed out.

In Alberta, it doesn’t matter what holiday it is; save for Christmas, all stores are open, all the time. Quebec is a different story all together. We quickly learned that yesterday’s holiday Monday was celebrated by there being absolutely no large stores open. Our IKEA and Home Depot visit had to get pushed by a day. Instead, I managed to find a drugstore that sold cleaning supplies (thanks to everyone on Facebook), and Kevin and I spent the day cleaning our new place, walls, blinds, ceilings and all. It felt good.

Once the Videotron man was finished setting up our phone, internet and TV, we went for a walk around our neighborhood, Montreal-West, to get a feel for the new digs.

Of course I found myself popping in and out of the markets scoping for all of the gluten-free goodies. I managed to find a good amount – lots of quinoa, buckwheat, gluten-free pasta, and crackers. All within walking distance from our house. Aside from not being able to find flax oil just yet, I think I’ll have an easy enough time finding ingredients for my recipes.

On our way home, I noticed a bin just outside our house that I’d not seen when we came to visit a couple of weeks prior. Upon inspection, I learned that it’s a community compost. How AWESOME is that? They recycle here, have community gardens and compost… what more could a girl ask for? You better believe I’ll be filling up this bin every week. Woo hoo!

Here are a couple of extra pictures of our adventures, including some of the new place. It’s a beautiful, characteristic home, that I fell in love with instantly when we saw it online. We’re planning to do a bunch of little changes to it this week, including a bunch of painting to liven up the rooms… all before our things arrive on the weekend. Time to get to it!

This entry was tagged: home projects, montreal