User blog comment:Freefalling Lilacs/Taking the week off/@comment-1874924-20140622014425

I've been on a few road trips to Quebec with a friend who lives in Boston. (His name is Brett, and the Storyteller's son in LTDI is named after him.) Our main destinations were usually Montreal and Quebec City, though sometimes just Montreal. I have few notable memories from those trips:


 * 1) Cafe Santropol in Montreal. A restaurant known for (among other things) strange sandwich combinations. Most of these work well enough, but their Hungarian Cheese sandwich is so loathsome that it will appear in LTDI's version of the Brunch of Disgustingness. This is why LTDI Leshawna is from Montreal: I needed for someone to be familiar with that sandwich.
 * 2) During a trip around the (U.S.) Thanksgiving holiday, we stopped for dinner at a pizza place some 30 km outside of Quebec City. Although Montreal is very bilingual, in QC and the rural parts of Quebec you run into a lot of people who only speak French. Brett made an observation that "We could just as well be in Denver. We're eating in a pizza place where the waitress doesn't speak English." (In Denver, where we both grew up, there are a lot of first-generation immigrants who only speak Spanish.)
 * 3) In 1990, we were staying at Chateau Frontenac in QC, and I decided to surprise my then-girlfriend (now wife) with a phone call. When she picked up, I asked, "How are you doing?" She replied, "Terrible. My dad just died." Her dad had been running for a seat on a railroad commission, and the election was too close to update the ballot, so her late father became the subject of a newspaper article titled, "Deceased Candidate Still on Ballot".