A Relaxed Day in Montreal Waiting for My Sister to Arrive

Rita stayed in the hotel room; I rented an eBike and went to Schwartz's Deli and elsewhere.

BIXI is the company which rents electric and non-electric bicycles from kiosks across Montreal. After some difficulty figuring it all out, I was off wandering around downtown Montreal on a quiet Saturday (little traffic, lots of pedestrians, some demonstrations). The weather was perfect: sunny and about 20 degrees Celius, 70 degrees F.

I immediately regretted the rental (but kept going anyway) because these bikes have hard tires and no suspension, and the bumpy streets gave my brain a physical workout bordering on a headache. Joel Frensdorf, our friend from the world cruise and a subscriber to this blog, said I shouldn’t miss Schwartz’s Deli, which is just a mile from our hotel. I got there with Siri’s help, only to find a long line waiting to get in:

So, I left hungry. I did, however, get to experience how widespread the separated bike lanes are in Montreal. The BIXI app screenshot below shows city bike lanes as green lines. All those dots are BIXI locations. Yes, this is a big-time bicycle city despite its cold, snowy winters! (The blue dot in my iPhone at the hotel.)

If you zoom in on the map, each location with an available electric bike has a thunderbolt icon. The image below is on my laptop, and it doesn’t show the bike lanes:

I’m so pleased to have been a personal friend of Bob Silverman, the “velo-rutionary” who, with the tactics he implemented through Le Monde à Bicyclette, transformed Montreal from a car-only city which banned bicycles on its metro and on the bridges crossing the river into the most bicycle friendly city in the world. When he died two years ago, it made front-page news in the Montreal Gazette under this headline, 'Bicycle Bob' Silverman, a father of Montreal's vélorution, dies at 88.” Read that article, and you’ll be moved, as I was, by his commitment and his accomplishment. That’s just one of several obituaries, including in Forbes and on the CBC, about Bob. Although Le Monde à Bicyclette, which Bob founded in 1975, disbanded in 1999, his impact was so profound that a website recording its history and legacy (the one linked above) was created by another organization that Bob Silverman and Claire Morisette created in its wake called Cyclo Nord-Sud, which collects unwanted bicycles and bicycle parts and recycles them for the benefit of poorer populations and nations to the south. Over 70,000 bicycles have been donated in this way, empowering women, getting children to school and relieving poverty, according to its website.

My 37-minute ride was not cheap. The rental was $1.15 plus 35 cents per minute, so it cost me over $14 (CAD) or just over $10 USD. Also, they charged $100 security deposit which will be credited back within 30 days. Over a decade ago, Rita and I were in Paris for a couple weeks and for nominal sum (8 euros per week) I had unlimited 30-minute rentals on a similarly widespread system of non-electric bicycles, and it was great! No more! I checked their website and it’s rather expensive now and no plan offers unlimited 30-minute rentals. C’est la vie.

This led me to search my YouTube channel for my May 2015 Paris videos, and I found three! One explains how to rent a Velib bicycle, another how to rent an Autolib electric car, and a third on what it’s like to bicycle in Paris. For that one, I put my iPhone in my breast pocket with the camera facing forward and narrated the entire 28 minutes. Rita and I had fun watching these videos again! They are time capsules from nine years ago! Bicycling (indeed, the acceptance of cars) in Paris I’ve heard is quite different now and will be quite different in another 10 years! Rita and I look forward to returning sometime soon.

About 6pm, my sister Sue Davis, who lives a few hours away in northern Maine, will arrive driving the 2017 Tesla Model X which I transferred to her before leaving for Sweden. She is bringing a large bottle of pre-mixed Manhattans, the favorite cocktail of all three of us. Then we will probably go out to dinner. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave on our foliage tour of upper New England on our way to her and my childhood home of Freeport, Maine. I’m sending this blog post now, so I won’t have to finish it later.