Montreal, Canada

Good morning, heartache

The day has barely begun and already, Lesley is on the phone. We have to head back to Toronto today, and should leave around lunch time, if we want to get home at a decent hour. Oh how my heart aches at having to end our mini-vacation here.

There were still two things on the list that we had to do before we left:

1. Get some bagels to bring home.
2. Eat a real Montreal smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz's. Chiu recommended that we get there as early as possible, as there is invariably a line-up there. And he was right.

The sandwiches were incredible - I can see why people make such a big fuss over them now. The cheers coming from my stomach actually drowned out the strangled shrieks coming from my hardening arteries. And I didn't even get the fatty cut.

We had a minor confrontation with a homeless guy, as we were trying to pull away from the curb, after eating. Ted, for some reason, decided to open the car door for the guy and wouldn't close it or push the guy away. Eventually, when Chiu and I were about to get out of the car to spill some bum blood, the guy went away.

Run Lola, Run

On the way back, there was some accident on the highway, which had traffic backed up as far as the eye could see. We were lucky to be at the tail end of it, so we were still able to take the detour. But our luck wasn't without incident. While we were sitting in traffic, talking back and forth on the walkie-talkies, we told Ted to get out of the car (jokingly) and run up to Lesley's car.

The moron actually got out and started running up the side of the highway - two seconds later, traffic started moving again. I'm sure he gave a couple of people on the road heart attacks, cuz lord knows the last thing I want to see when I am stranded in traffic, is a big, hairy Greek guy barelling past my car.

Start spreading the news...

As a bit of payback for Lesley's ill-fated hippie bongo fest, we decided to make her stop at the Big Apple and take photos with us. If you've never been to this place, let me tell you that it's full of entertaining, apple-related facts and paraphenalia. A perfect way to wrap up a perfect long weekend.

For example, did you know that if you unpeel this enormous apple and stretch the peel northward, you will get 3/4 of the way to the giant orange? Or, if this apple was real, you could make 16,000 apple pies out of it, which would feed the island nation of Malta for an entire year? Incredible!

Near the end, Lesley was getting visibly irritated, so we had to leave...but not before we pulled one more prank on Emiko.