Category Archives: Quick Tips

Montreal in Winter: Preparing for Your Trip

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I get a fair amount of email from people about travel to Montréal, and it generally falls into two categories: where to eat, and what to pack in winter.

My idea of the most interesting places to eat changes every year, but I feel like I can give some evergreen advice about packing for a Montréal trip in winter. Here are a few thoughts.

Weather

It’s as variable in Montréal as it is anywhere in the northeast and the upper midwest. It’s not always freezing cold; sometimes, it’s downright warm for the season. Over the next six days (12/12-18), the afternoon highs will range from -7°C to 7°C (20°F to 45°F). That’s a spread, even before you get to the elements of winter: rain, freezing rain, snow, wind.

Normal temperatures: high -3°C (26°F) and low -11°C (12°F). The reality over 7 years of Christmas holidays in Montréal: I’ve experienced a temperature range from -15°F to 45°F and heavy snow to rain to dry, sunny weather.

You could grab your biggest suitcase and fill it with everything from your closet, but here’s a sanity-based packing list:

  • warm gloves or mittens, quality scarf, cap. Cities are windy, even when gusts aren’t in the forecast.
  • winter coat: rather than a heavy, long winter coat, I prefer a short, warm leather jacket and a hoodie sweatshirt to wear underneath. Most of the time, I need both, but for warm days, I can remove a layer.
  • long underwear: your lower extremities will thank you for this.
  • socks: heavy winter socks, especially if you get cold feet like I often do.
  • shoes: I wear a pair of winter boots. I used to take other shoes for dining out and such, but aside from a pair of tennis shoes for the gym, I now rely solely on that pair of black winter boots. (Most Montréal restaurants are casual and believe me, they understand winter isn’t a time for niceties.) Ideally, your shoes will be waterproof; melting snow can leave huge pools of standing water, especially on the cobblestones of Old Montréal. It’s no fun being soaked to the skin.
  • travel-size umbrella.
  • sunglasses: Montréal is often sunny and one does like to look cool.

Montréal has an Underground City, and when it’s too cold to walk the 1.6 miles from my auberge to Café Myriade for the best coffee in the city, I still walk, but I make most of the trek indoors and underground. Layers are especially handy then, as you move from warm to cold and back.

The rest of my packing list? Well, it’s largely the stuff of personal taste, but here goes:

  • gym clothes: tennis shoes, socks, shirts, sweats
  • Airport Express: to translate and extend internet
  • power strip: portions of the auberge where I stay date to the 18th century; the late 20th century renovation didn’t include enough electrical outlets. Most hotels everywhere have this problem. (In case you don’t know, all of North America follows the same electrical standard. No adaptors needed.)
  • money: Since I go to Canada once a year or more often, I keep a stash of Canadian currency. The last thing I want to do after getting off the airplane at Trudeau, is to hunt down an ATM. I want to jump in a cab and get to my hotel! Cab fare from the airport to the Old City is $38 + tip at this writing, and I already have the cash for it in my pocket.
  • small speakers: a Bose or Jawbone travel speaker doesn’t sound stunning, but it’s nice to play music in one’s room.
  • iOS dock cables: enough for a small army of iDevices.
  • passport: this is mandatory.
  • phone data plan: I’ve stopped doing this because the plans are ridiculously expensive and you often have to keep the plan in place for 2 months because phone companies are slow about billing each other. Now, I forgo ubiquitous access and rely on wifi only.

Customs

Trudeau airport opened a brand new terminal for flights to and from the US in 2009. It’s a vast improvement, and entry to and exit from Canada is now more speedy and streamlined. When you return to the US, you go through preclearance at Trudeau, so you’re officially on US territory once you’re through, and you won’t face additional clearance when you get back home.

Getting from Airport to Downtown

This is an easy answer: take a cab. There is 747 Express bus service from the airport to downtown Montréal for the budget price of C$8, and if you’re comfortable with the tradeoff of a longer trip for less money, this is a workable option. There is a proposal for light rail service from Trudeau airport to downtown, but that’s a few years and a billion dollars away. 

Christmas: Where to Eat?

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I’ve asked this question before on the blog: Where do you go to eat on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when you’re a tourist in another city and you don’t have friends in town?

Many restaurants close on Christmas Eve, and most are closed on Christmas Day. The options? There’s always Chinese. We enjoyed a fun dim sum lunch at Ruby Rouge in Montréal’s Chinatown on Christmas 2008. As for dinners, we’ve found our best bet to be hotel restaurants, most of which stay open for their guests, however small the number of guests might be. Our go-to’s for the past 6 years? Bonaparte, which creates a rather beautiful and delicious French/Quebecois meal on Christmas Eve and Christmas night; and Otto at the W Hotel, which offers Italian-inspired food, also quite good.

Otherwise, be prepared for everything to be closed, from shops in the Underground City to the Couche-tard down the street. Particularly in the Old City, it’s not a good day to be in need of a quick snack, a toothbrush or a box of tissues, so think ahead on 12/23 or Christmas Eve so you’re not caught.

In other words, it’s really not that different from a Christmas Day back home, but back home you’re not restricted to what’s in your suitcase. If you’re staying at a hotel or auberge that offers a breakfast, there’s an extra guaranteed meal that you won’t have to think about.

Chowhounders are discussing what restaurants will be open in Montréal this holiday season – check out the conversation and join in, if you have any suggestions. If you’re staying in the city over the holidays, your concierge can help you, and you can consult OpenTable to see which of its participating restaurants.

What’s our plan for this year? Bonaparte on Christmas Eve… and on Christmas night, most likely Otto, unless something more intriguing grabs our attention.

(photo: Laloux on 12/20/09)

Visiting Montréal in Winter: What to Pack

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Most of the email we get from readers about Montreal has to do with winter weather. How cold does it get? Is it windy? What should we bring for a December or January trip? Since I’m in planning/packing mode for this year’s trip, I thought offer a few thoughts. I don’t have any breathtaking insights. These questions are hard to answer definitively, and the best example is the latest weather forecast for Montreal:

  • Today (Wednesday 12/16): snow and 15°F
  • Tomorrow: clear and 8°F
  • Fri: clear and 10°F
  • Saturday: snow and 15°F
  • Sunday: partly cloudy and 17°F

And here’s the norm: 26°F during the day and 12°F at night. In 6 years of Christmastime vacations in Montreal, we’ve experienced a temperature range from -15° to 40° and heavy snow to rain to dry weather. If you’re planning a short trip of 2-4 days, you can tune your packing more closely to the weather forecast . But for longer trips like ours, we try to be prepared for a broad range of weather, with varying success from year to year. Here’s the outerwear (and underwear) portion of my packing checklist:

  • warm gloves, quality scarf, cap (think cold and wind).
  • winter coat: rather than a heavy, long winter coat, I prefer a combo coat and hoodie sweatshirt. Most of the time, you’ll want and need both of them, but for unexpectedly warm days, remove one and wear the other.
  • long underwear: your lower extremities will thank you for this.
  • socks: we pack a mix of regular winter socks and heavy winter socks.
  • shoes: we pack a pair of tennis shoes, and a boot of some kind. I have some Timberland boots that are fur-lined and quite warm. I can wear them every day if I need to (most restaurants are casual). Ideally, your shoes will be waterproof; melting snow can leave huge pools of standing water, especially in Old Montreal. It’s no fun being soaked to the skin.
  • umbrella: we had rain briefly in 2007. The cap you packed will come in handy or you can toss a travel-size umbrella in the suitcase.
  • sunglasses.

It’s often windy, and even if the forecast doesn’t indicate it, it can still be blustery in the wind tunnel of urban streets. Probably not as intense as a winter day in downtown Chicago, but even if it feels nice when you step out the door of your hotel, I’d still recommend hat, gloves, and scarf. Layers is the standard recommendation, right? It’s a good idea, especially if your trek around the city includes periods of walking outdoors and walking in the Underground City or while you’re shopping. When you’re indoors, you’ll want to peel off some of your gear without removing all of it.

Where to Stay in Old Montréal

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I got an email from a reader asking for a few recommendations for places to stay in Montréal, and after I answered him, I thought I’d post my recommendations here. These recommendations are highly biased (what on this blog isn’t?), and all the hotels are located in Old Montréal. If you want to stay elsewhere, feel free to point your Google at downtown hotels or hotels on Sherbrooke, but here’s my list of recommendations if you want the charm of the Old City, and you want to avoid the most heavily “touristed” area of rue St Paul E. Prices range from about $170 a night to around $300.

Auberge-style hotels

  • Auberge Les Passants du Sans Soucy: we stay here every holiday. Nine rooms, each quite beautiful, friendly and helpful staff, with a great breakfast included.
  • Bonaparte: This place has 30 rooms; the best are Terrace rooms, facing the gardens of Notre Dame Basilica. They’re a little more expensive compared to other rooms in the hotel, but the view is wonderful.

Boutique hotels

  • St Paul Hotel: an old bank building, I think. Beautiful, high-ceilinged rooms. Extremely cool space. This hotel makes a statement and feels regal, but comfortable.
  • Hotel Gault: another hotel that’s extremely cool, although the rooms don’t make the same vaulting architectural statement as the St Paul. But if you don’t need a 15-foot ceiling, and you want a sleek, modern aesthetic, you’ll enjoy the Gault.

Recommended tourist hotels

  • Le Saint-Sulpice: We’ve not stayed in this hotel but it comes highly recommended by all kinds of people. Its look is more conventional, but very tasteful.
  • Hotel Nelligan: Same situation – we’ve not stayed here but we know people who have and they like it, although I’ve seen a couple reviews say the rooms are small.

Chain hotels

  • W Hotel: You either love the W or like it, or hate it. We love it. Last I knew (December 2008; I’ll check again next week), this hotel hasn’t been converted to the new white look of the W, so the rooms and hallways are dark and shadowy. The bars are cool and there are always beautiful people to look at.
  • Le Westin Montréal: The new Westin opened in 2009, located at the edge of the Old City. For the past two winters, we’ve walked by the old Gazette printing press facility and watched its transformation into a huge atrium for the hotel. It’s new, and yes, it has the Heavenly Bed. Enough said.

Where to eat on Christmas Night

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So here’s the open question: Where can we eat on the holiday?

This is the question that vexes the traveler who isn’t planning to spend the holidays with family or friends. And the holidays are a great leveler because whether you’re new to a city or a frequent visitor, you can still be frustrated when you start to feel hunger pangs and you face the prospect of block after block of closed restaurants.

We’ve been spending the holiday in Montreal for 6 years now, and every year, we subject our long-considered list of desired restaurants to the reality of holiday hours. Most of the time we can make it all work out. We arrive about a week before Christmas and leave shortly thereafter, so we can manage our reservations around what’s open on a particular night.

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But it’s not easy. Not only do most restaurants close for a few days (or longer) but others close capriciously – and here’s what I mean by that: last year, we reserved at Bronte about 3 weeks before our trip – it had been on our list for a couple years and we wanted to check it out. A week before our trip, Bronte called. They wouldn’t be able to fulfill our reservation on Open Table because they were actually closed that night. Why they’d not communicated that with Open Table? I’m not sure, but during the phone conversation they told us they’d be open on Boxing Day and they could accommodate us. So, we reserved for 12/26. On the afternoon of 12/26, Bronte called again: “We’re sorry but we won’t be open tonight.” It’s likely they looked at the number of reservations for the evening and decided it wasn’t worth bringing in the staff. Understandable, but frustrating, and Bronte is now off our list.

Christmas Eve is usually workable. A number of reputable restaurants are open because families and large parties often eat out before Midnight Mass or other celebrations. Christmas night is another matter. With the exception of hotel restaurants or Chinese restaurants, most everything is closed. Our Christmas dining record? Four Christmas night meals at Otto (W Hotel) and one dinner at Koko (Opus Hotel).

Whenever I mention Otto as the Christmas Night meal, it seems, a Chowhound or foodie will write to say something like, “I hardly think Otto is a great choice for someone interested in food.” To which I always respond with a sanitized version of, “Duh, but please suggest a better restaurant that’s open on Christmas Night.” I’ve never received a suggestion.

Chinese restaurants are a well-known option for Christmas Night because many of them are open. That’s something we’ve considered, except that our other Christmas Day tradition, dim sum for lunch, provides us with enough Chinese food for the day.

Locals can’t often provide much help with this question because most of them are at home with family and friends, recovering from a huge Christmas dinner.

But surely someone – tourist or local – has gone to a restaurant on Christmas Night in Montreal. If you’ve done so, where have you gone? What can you recommend?

photo: Christmas Day dim sum consumption at Ruby Rouge

Coping with Winter Weather

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A week from today, we’ll be in Montreal, most likely extra jittery from our first visit to Cafe Myriade, and excited about our first full day there in almost a year. After all the planning and prep, we’re ready to get there. The biggest unknown in our planning scenario is weather.

We’re not the only ones. The majority of email we get from readers about Montreal has to do with winter weather. How cold does it get? Is it windy? What should we bring for a December or January trip?

These questions are the hardest to answer, and the best example is the current weather forecast for Montreal:

  • Today (Saturday 12/13): cloudy and 7°F
  • Tomorrow: light snow, clouds and 37°F
  • Monday: rain, windy and 48°F
  • Tuesday: sunny and 26°F
  • Wednesday: snow or rain and 36°F

And here’s the norm: 28°F during the day and 14°F at night.

You can look at this forecast and get tied up in knots while trying to pack. (We’ve been there.) The weather during your trip could be quite normal. Or your trip could be the outlier: our first holiday there in 2004 was extremely cold and windy; last year, we arrived days after a huge snowstorm (even for Montreal), and all the snow melted in warm weather; we had a couple days with the temperature near 40°F.

Environment Canada generally publishes forecasts for four days out, unlike the National Weather Service and private forecasters in the US, which often give you a week-long snapshot. If your trip is brief, you might be able to pack with some certainty (as far as you can trust the forecast), but if you’re planning a longer trip (8 days for us this time) you need to follow some rules of thumb. Here are ours.

  • warm gloves, quality scarf, cap (think cold and wind)
  • winter coat: rather than a heavy, long winter coat, we prefer a combo coat and hoodie sweatshirt. Most of the time, you’ll want and need both of them, but for unexpectedly warm days, remove one and wear the other.
  • long underwear: your lower extremities will thank you for this.
  • socks: we pack a mix of regular winter socks and heavy winter socks
  • shoes: we pack a pair of tennis shoes, and a boot of some kind. I have some Timberland boots that are fur-lined and quite warm. I can wear them every day if I need to (most restaurants are casual). Ideally, your shoes will be waterproof; last year, all the melting snow left huge pools of standing water, especially in Old Montreal. It’s no fun being soaked to the skin.
  • umbrella: last year was the first year we had rain. The cap you packed will come in handy or you can toss a travel-size umbrella in the suitcase.
  • sunglasses: yep, I found these very useful last year.

That’s our list. What did we miss? If you travel to Montreal (or some other cold place) in the winter, what do you take with you?

Buying Wine in Quebec

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Like many visitors to Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec, we’ve found ourselves going out in search of wine. We wanted to give it as a gift to friends, drink it at a restaurant, or share it back in our room. Like many visitors, we’ve found our first trips to SAQ to be dissatisfying.

An interesting discussion about purchasing wine in Quebec has popped up in Chowhound in the past couple of days, and if you travel to Quebec and like to buy wine, you might find it worth reading.

SAQ is Quebec’s provincial liquor monopoly; you can buy some wine elsewhere, in grocery stores and dépanneurs, but it’s only a small amount compared to what SAQ moves every year.

The conversation thread on Chowhound adds some depth to my knowledge and also provides some options for getting access to a wider variety of wine. For tourists, this isn’t optimal because it entails ordering wine in advance and then picking it up at a SAQ outlet. If you have friends in the province, perhaps they can do this for you.

A couple other observations that took us a SAQ visit or two to figure out:

  • There are different kinds of SAQ outlets. The Wikipedia entry is helpful here. We discovered through trial and error that Sélection and Signature offer the kinds of wines and the selection that we desire. Express sells a lot of popular wines; it’s a good fall back if it’s the only SAQ outlet near you.
  • We’re constantly reminded of the near invisibility of US wines outside the United States. The first time you walk into SAQ and see a couple of shelves devoted to California wines, and the shelves are filled with Beaulieu, Bogle, Mondavi, Fetzer and other such wine producers, you can get quite a jolt. California wines are world class, but finding anything but commodity California wine outside the US takes an effort. That said, there’s often excellent French and Italian wine. So if you “retune” your expectations, you’re likely to leave happy, with some excellent wine under your arm.

What to Bring?

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That question causes no end of thinking and re-thinking. And, of course, it’s not really about Montreal; it’s about traveling and packing, in general. Every time I travel, I over-pack, filling a suitcase to overflowing with all the stuff I think I might wear, as well as all the shoes to match, and the supporting cables for my growing array of gadgets. And every time I return, I assess the pile of unused stuff in the suitcase and try to remember what I was thinking.

I’m much better than I used to be about packing, but I still pack way too much stuff. I’ve discovered that the way to solve this problem is to get at the assumptions that drive it:

*My leisure travel experience is going to be so different from my leisure time at home.

If I liked to ski or was into climbing, the assumption might be correct. But, in fact, my leisure travel experiences boil down to lounging around, walking around, eating, sleeping, sitting in a cafe, walking through a museum… in other words, despite the change in location, my activities are not that different from when I’m at home. The clothes that I wear when I travel don’t need to be anything special.

*Packing is worst-case scenario planning.

Yes, but what if the Prime Minister invites us to dinner? A bit carried away, but I find that one of the biggest traps I fall into is trying to plan for all kinds of possibilities. The result is usually an array of different outfits stuffed into the suitcase – many of them “just in case” I need them. Usually I don’t.

*I’m going to wear lots of clothes while I travel.

Actually, I won’t. At home, over the course of a week – 5 weeknights and 2 weekend days – I probably wear 3 different shirts and one pair of jeans. But if I’m traveling for a week, I pack 7 shirts and 3 pairs of jeans. Why? The truth of the matter is that when I’m traveling for pleasure, I wear the clothes that I like more than once, just as I do at home.

For me, those three assumptions get at much of what is wrong with my packing. So, taking the 7 day trip to Montreal as my example, here’s my plan for the next trip in December 2008:

* Choose one core color
I have lots of black shirts, sweaters, shoes, etc. If I put one brown thing in the suitcase, it’s all over because I have to pack the brown coat, the brown shoes, the brown belt. So I can choose one or the other, but not both.

* Realistically assess how you’ll wear what you pack
Over seven days, I can easily get by with 3-4 t-shirts for casual wear during the day, maybe less if I’m going to be wearing sweaters or sweatshirts, too. Two pairs of jeans is plenty. You want to think about what happens if something gets dirty, but don’t think about it too much. For evening wear, again be realistic. This year I took two dress shirts and a pair of dress pants, just in case I wanted to wear them to dinner. They never left the hotel room. If your dinners are going to be at casual restaurants, don’t bother with that stuff. If you want to turn up the knob just a bit at dinner, you can put on a nice sweater without having the ditch the jeans. That sweater will probably do you just fine for any number of dinners where you want to look a bit nicer. And if you’re like me, most of the time you’ll be happy enough to stay in casual mode when you know the restaurant allows it.

Those two steps will cut the volume of clothes I pack by at least a third. Now, to the cords and shit that our connected generation requires.

* Pack a powerstrip
No hotel has enough outlets for all the stuff we cart along with us. A small powerstrip makes life so much easier.

* Portable speakers
There are times when I like having music on in the hotel room and I don’t want to be enclosed in headphones. Chuck bought me a small JBL speaker system with an iPod dock a couple years ago. This is a perfect solution, especially in hotel rooms that don’t feature the newer clock radios with aux jacks. It’s a one piece solution for soothing sounds in your room. It also charges the iPod.

* Cable management
“Management” is the best you can do – most devices have nothing in common when it comes to cords. Those travel chargers with all the various connectors are a big help, but I’ve also had success without them. I focus on charging and syncing, gather the cables that I need, and stow them neatly in the suitcase.

* Backup protection
You’d be crazy to backup your computer before a trip and then take both the computer and the backup drive with you – but I think you should have some kind of backup media along for the ride, especially if you’re going to be taking lots of pictures and uploading them to your laptop, or doing some writing while you’re away. I back my stuff up to 4 different places, two of them off-site, so I don’t feel like I’m living dangerously if I take my Time Machine portable backup drive with me. If both get stolen or destroyed, I might lose all my photos from that trip, but everything else is safe. And as off-site backup solutions improve, and quality (in other words, true high speed) wireless internet becomes more common at hotels and cafes, I can upload even large numbers of photos easily to off-site backup locations.

That’s the current state of my education in packing. I’ll apply my new rules to upcoming trips and adjust them as I need to. I’m sure there’s much more to learn.

Getting Around Montreal

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A few notes about getting around. Finding a taxi never seems difficult. If you’re staying in the Old City, you can often find them roaming about, or calling a cab will bring one to you within a couple minutes. There’s also a taxi stand at Place d’Armes, across the square from the Cathedral de Notre Dame.

The Metro has two stops that are convenient to the Old City – Victoria Square and Place d’Armes. We’ve used each interchangeably. Taking the Metro in the direction of Henri Bourassa gets you to Berri-UQAM, where you have access to the other Metro lines. Each ticket is approximately C$2.50 and you save a little bit by buying in quantity. You get paper tickets that you deposit in a box and the stationmaster manually unlocks the turnstile for you. It’s not hard to do, not confusing, and the trains are frequent. You’ll probably save lots of cab fare this way.

The Undergound City is another very good option, especially in the winter. There are a couple routes that get you downtown to St. Catherine – one goes north from Victoria Square Metro station and another goes north from the Place d’Armes station. These two paths are interconnected through the Palais du Congres and you can easily enter or exit the Underground City to stop at other destinations. The signage is quite good and there are maps posted, too. When you’re outdoors, look for signs that say R E S O, with the “O” being the symbol of the Metro. From our experience, the first trip is a little confusing, but we’ve never been lost and after our tentative exploration of the Underground City last year, we felt like old pros this time around.

More about the Metro
Metro Maps
Metro System Map
More about the Underground City
Underground City Map