Montreal: Day 2

We started our second day in Montreal with the Gillespie's famous vanilla cinnamon pancakes and had we stopped the day right there it still would have been a good one :) Our first thing on the agenda was to check out Mount Royal, a beautiful spot that looks out over the city.

We warmed up for a bit in the Chalet du Mont Royal. It was such a pretty building and we especially loved the warm fire and the squirrel statues in the rafters :)

We walked through a portion of the Mount Royal Park, which was designed by the same man who designed NYC's Central Park.

 Bryn's favorite part was climbing on the statues, of course.

Next we drove down the road to Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal. It's Canada's largest church and the dome is the third largest of it's kind in the world. Not too shabby. It was a really neat church, full of beautiful architecture, art, and religious displays.

 I didn't take a good picture, but we had an amazing lunch at this little bakery. This was a surprise to me, but did you know that Montreal is totally a French city? It felt like we were in a foreign country (well....more foreign than Canada) because all the signs were in French and everyone spoke to us in French until we explained we couldn't understand. Anyway, the croissants and pastries we had in Montreal were just as good as the treats I had Paris years ago. I should have bought a dozen croissants in Montreal to bring home with us! So good!

After lunch we dropped off the kids and husbands and Robyn and I took the metro to the Montreal Museum of Find Arts. We didn't have time to check out everything, but we spent a good hour on the modern art floors and they had a really great collection. 

(Bad hair day. Woah).

We also checked out some cool art in this museum across the street that had a huge collection of Canadian art. Lots of good stuff.

 We had such a fun time checking out Montreal and it reminded us how lucky we are to live in a place that is so close to so many cool cities! Big thanks to Robyn and Jethro for being such fabulous hosts and tour guides!