Bonjour Mes Amis!

WE'RE BACK FROM MONTREAL
It was a great vacation and Montreal was very enjoyable if a bit hard for us to get used to. I guess our problem can be summed up by Rose's and my reactions to it. Rose was bothered because it didn't seem right for somewhere that seemed so basically American (including the people) to have people speaking French in casual conversation. I was bothered because the French seemed right but it was too familiar, too American, to be a foreign country. However we got past all that. Montreal is a beautiful city and the weather was fantastic, although all the natives kept darkly mentioning the long, hard, terribly cold winters.

We really hit vacation mode once we got our Metro passes. It seems that our best vacations always take place when we can use the subway to get around. We took all but 3 of our 150 photos on the digital camera card and visited everything we could find, which mainly consisted of large, gorgeous churches. Montreal, like so much of the U.S. doesn't tend to have a lot of the monuments and memorials of the sort that we like to visit. What better for a bunch of "happy Catholics" to do than drop in on a lot of churches? My favorite was one we didn't plan to visit but wound up going to first because it was near the hotel ... Marie Reine du Monde (Mary, Queen of the World). It is a one-quarter size replica of St. Peter's in Rome, light, airy and a fitting tribute to Our Blessed Mother and Our Lord. We'll be posting photos later but for now a few of my favorite memories are:

• Hannah saying a prayer on each of the 300 steps up to l'Oratoire St-Joseph while climbing on her knees ... yes, on her knees. Somewhere in Japan her photo is going to be shown to everyone because one gentleman just couldn't believe it and took a long time getting just the right shot.


• Rose saying a prayer on each step while walking up them and then sitting at the top of each flight to lend her sister moral support.


• Visiting Basilique Notre Dame and talking to a young couple. The man kept repeating over and over in awestruck tones, "This is incredible." Then the woman turned to him and asked if he was ok. He had tears in his eyes and said, "I'm fine. I'm just having a moment."


• Attending the Mass in French at Marie Reine du Monde. I looked sideways halfway through and realized that we were in the "crossfire" so to speak of the magnificent shrines to Mary and Jesus. Really a perfect moment.


• Our whole family being convulsed with laughter while fighting over the only chair we could find, halfway through the McCord Museum. I was reminded then of why we take vacations ... to enjoy being with each other in a unique way that is our family's alone.


• The entire vacation being punctuated by one-liners from The Simpsons, Futurama and This is Spinal Tap, thanks to Hannah and Rose. Again, its a family thing.


• "The Name Game" which was played all over Montreal, with Tom and me supplying various options whenever someone got stuck, which happened more and more as our brains got more disconnected from "reality."