We camped adjacent to a marina across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Our site was at the top of a steep riverbank. Hank had to rig a rope handrail to safely navigate the slope. Charlie had little trouble.

We walked 3 minutes to a passenger ferry that got us to the old port within 30 minutes. Montreal is a much more modern city than Québec. Lots of industrial buildings lined the waterfront along our ferry ride, including the original Molson brewery. There was not a large  of old concentration of original buildings, like in Québec

Within a few blocks of the ferry dock, we found a garden restaurant with a large covered courtyard in the center. We had a tasty meal before a jazz trio started playing near the end of our meal. They performed jazz classics in English. The singer was very good. Then the heavens opened and a downpour started. The canopies above the courtyard had several leaks, some by design which watered planters. But our table was nice and dry. We got pretty wet walking back to the ferry, though, since we hadn’t brought rain jackets.

The next day we joined a guided walking tour to get an overview of the city’s history and layout. The tour wasn’t as interesting as the one in Quebec but we still enjoyed it. Old Montreal is one square mile – about twice the size of Old Quebec – but there aren’t as many original buildings in Old Montreal and the ground is fairly flat. They haven’t preserved any of the original wall, for example.

We learned that Montreal was a big commercial center on the St. Lawrence River, because there are 45-foot waterfalls upstream from the city. Sailing ships had to unload their gear in Montreal and have it portaged above the falls in order to resume their journey upstream. The merchants in Montreal thus became important and wealthy middlemen. The first locks were built in 1871.

Quite a large British banking system grew up in Montreal. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Rue St. Jacques (St. James Street) was the center of Montreal’s financial district, where several major English insurance, banking, and trust companies built their Canadian head offices. The French elite class returned to France after the British gained possession of New France in the treaty of Paris in 1763, leaving a vacuum of financial leadership that was filled by the British. Many of these grand bank buildings are still open and we got to peek inside a couple including the Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada office that has been transformed into the Crew Cafe and office space. The scale and embellishments were reminiscent of Renaissance palaces.

Montreal is an island about 8 times the size of Manhattan, with a population about 25% more than Manhattan. There is a subway system that was opened just in time for the Expo in 1967. In the central business district, there is a large underground city – a series of interconnected tunnels between office towers, hotels, shopping centres, residential and commercial complexes, convention halls, universities and performing arts venues. This underground network comes in pretty handy in the winter in Montreal, which has an average annual snowfall of 83 inches and average temperature of 19 to 27 F.