Day 1 - Toronto to Montreal

Gigi and I travelled to Toronto the day before to avoid traffic going into Toronto. Saving about three hours from London to Toronto with at least one hour of stop-and-go traffic helped. Particularly for today, Dennis started out early and did live traffic report of a huge delay in the Trenton area. Turned out that there was a fatal crash on eastbound 401 just after Trenton just after midnight Friday morning. The highway was closed for hours for clean-up. We decided to go around that area. Perhaps not saving a lot of time but saving a lot of frustration surely from getting stuck in detours.

It is summer time in Canada and there are road construction everywhere. Amid one of the slow-downs of traffic, first stop was lunch at Havelock. A small town that we have never heard about before but all that matters is there is a Tim Hortons. It used to be MacDonald's that travellers would go to have their rest stops. Now, it is replaced by Tim Hortons, at least in Canada. We bought coffees and used the outside gazebo eating our Chinese buns. It was perfect.  Dustin took up the driving duty and off we went to Ottawa. 

We had a little bit of time before Sarah was ready so we visited our favourite pastry/sandwich shop, Le Moulin de Provence, in Byward Market and have our afternoon coffee. 

Knowing that going through downtown Montreal is usually trouble in terms of traffic, we went south early on to reach our Airbnb in Le Prairie without too much trouble. 

The Airbnb is not fancy but did the trick for us simply staying overnight. We fully utilized the kitchen to have taco night. Most of us used the outside garden area with patio table for dinner and relaxing afterwards. That is perhaps the best feature of the place.

Perhaps too much driving for the day, so no one is particularly interested is going out. So we stayed put and got ready for the next driving day.

Havelock

Le Moulin de Provence

Airbnb