The Mother of All Road Trips: Oh Canada - A Disappointing Start

First Leg - Toronto to Montreal:

Series Collection

Bags packed - Check

Digital tickets Ready - Check

Passports in hand - Check & Double Check

The flight from Charlotte Douglas International Airport to Toronto Pierson took the same amount of time as the drive from our home to Charlotte.

With drive time, parking & shuttle, baggage check, TSA security, and boarding wait time added in, our trip from Sumter, South Carolina to Toronto was just under 6 hours.

The good part is that Toronto is in the same time zone, so we didn’t have to account for an internal clock adjustment.

June is the beginning of Tourist season, so the lines for getting through Customs were long. Baggage checks were random and the agents seemed to process everyone efficiently, so if you are traveling with several others, I suggest splitting up to minimize delays.

None of our bags were inspected and about a half hour later, we were loading the rental car.

Thus, the start of our most epic Road Trip to date:

Sixteen days + 2300 Miles + Four CA Provinces + Four New England States + Six Private Rentals + Three Hotels = Hundreds of Memories

The planned stops:

Kingston, ON - 1 night

Montreal, QC - 1 night

Quebec City, QC - 2 nights

Miramichi, NB - 1 night

Prince Edward Island - 4 nights

Southwest Harbor, ME - 2 nights

Lake George, NY - 1 night

Niagara Falls, ON - 2 nights

Toronto, ON - 1 night

With a Tim Hortons (ON-based chain) on every corner and being tired and hungry, we thought it best to go ahead and eat before we headed to our first overnight stop, an Airbnb about three hours away in Kingston.

One thing I failed to account for was the toll routes in the Toronto area. Unlike many toll highways here in the states, Canada employs a cashless system of toll roads and you could be on one before you knew it.

The good part is that the rental car company is automatically assessed and adds the toll right to your final bill. The bad part (in my opinion) is the extensive camera system used to track vehicles on toll roads.

Our half day in Kingston was punctuated by hard rain, so we confined our time to Fort Henry. Being early June, the Summer activities and events had not begun yet, so we took a guided Historical tour. Fort Henry is similar to many 19th-century forts in the States but with a distinct Canadian/British Crown interest. We didn’t have time for a more historical perusing of Kingston. I will leave it at that.

Our main goal on this first full day in Canada was to get to Montreal, which turned out to be very disappointing.

We arrived late afternoon and drove straight to the Airbnb we had reserved. The reality of the location was nothing like the photos or description. The street-level glass door to the upstairs apartment had been broken and boarded up. And the street was such that I didn’t feel safe leaving our car with most of our belongings parked overnight. I thought for sure, “This cannot be the place”.

So, I called the manager, who spoke French with limited English. From our difficult conversation, I found out that she had not even been to the apartment to clean it and lived an hour away (it was 6 pm). She suggested that we go eat supper and she would have it ready afterwards.

When we got back to the apartment location, she had not even shown up yet, so I told her we needed to find somewhere else as it was nearly 8 pm by that time. She got very angry when I canceled the reservations.

The rest of the evening was spent finding a suitable hotel to stay. After navigating around the downtown area for several hours with no success, we ended up outside of the city at the Montreal Int’l Airport Hilton Garden - expensive, but quite nice. And at that point, the cost seemed irrelevant.

The next morning, we decided to write off Montreal and spend more time in Quebec City.

So, off we went for a beautiful drive out along the North shore of the St. Lawrence River to Trois Riviéres where we crossed over and drove through the beautiful rural landscape South of the river the rest of the way.

Next post - The Secrets of Quebec City (that sounds so Tabloidy, doesn’t it? ) Just kidding about the “Secrets” - well maybe I’ll try to work in something you may not know - QC was a totally different experience.

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