Bonjour,
Montréal.

Montréal was that trip for us.

It was April 2023, a long weekend at the start of spring break. Our itinerary was straightforward: fly Greensboro to LaGuardia to Montréal, spend four days exploring a city we'd never seen, take a day trip to Québec City, and come home rested. Simple enough. Except nothing about it was simple, and looking back, we wouldn't change a thing.

This was our first time traveling internationally together. We'd gotten our passports in 2020, right before Covid shut everything down, and they'd sat in a drawer for three years waiting for exactly this moment. Standing at LaGuardia, handing them over to board the flight to Montréal, felt like finally cashing in something we'd been saving.

Heather had never left the country. So when the gate agent took our documents and handed them back without a word, we looked at each other like we'd gotten away with something.

On the plane I kept watching out the window, trying to figure out the exact moment we crossed into Canada. I never could tell. But then Montréal appeared below us through the descent, the Olympic Stadium's distinctive leaning tower unmistakable against the skyline, Mount Royal rising behind it, and something clicked into place. We were somewhere new. Actually somewhere new.

Back home in North Carolina it had already been warm enough for shorts and short sleeves. Spring had arrived early and settled in. So when we stepped off the plane in Montréal and that first blast of cold, clean Canadian air hit us, it stopped us both for a second. We'd walked straight from one season into another, and somehow that felt exactly right.

We landed, turned off airplane mode, and discovered that Mint Mobile does not, in fact, work outside the United States without paying extra for it. Both phones: nothing. No signal, no data, no way to call anyone.

The airport had WiFi. We used it to find an Uber, typed in the address of the W Montréal, and got in the car with a driver whose language we weren't entirely sure of, hoping he was taking us where we thought he was taking us. He was. The W is a beautiful hotel near Victoria Square, and when we walked into the lobby and I said "bonjour," the staff responded with something warm that felt like genuine appreciation rather than polite tolerance. That small moment meant more than it probably should have.

We sorted the phones from the room, then went looking for lunch. We found Allo Mon Coco on our own, a bright cheerful local chain with those signature yellow walls. They didn't take credit cards. Back to the ATM, back to the restaurant, Canadian dollars in hand, problem solved. This would become the trip's operating rhythm: something slightly off, a quick adjustment, forward motion.

That afternoon we walked. Past the Olympic Committee headquarters, up to Rue Sainte-Catherine where all the shopping lives. Heather found a Pandora charm with a fleur-de-lis, and the sales associate gently corrected my pronunciation of it. Fair enough.

By mid-afternoon Marianne had texted. The ice storm was worse than expected. Dinner was off. She recommended Pizzeria No. 900 instead, and that recommendation turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip: wood-fired pizza and an arriencello, a crispy fried rice ball that we split and immediately wished we'd ordered two of. We walked back to the hotel tired and happy, having navigated our first foreign city on our own for an entire day. We slept well.

Heather had planned a full day bus trip to Québec City, and it was one of those travel decisions that looks great on paper and turns out to be even better in real life.

The bus was full. The driver addressed us first in French, then English. We drove out of Montréal watching the landscape change, stopping at a rest area where we found Cherry Bite soda, a Canadian brand we'd never seen, which immediately became one of those small discoveries that makes travel feel like exploration rather than tourism.

Québec City is something else entirely. We walked the lower town first, cobblestone streets lined with shops selling fleur-de-lis everything, the Funiculaire climbing the cliff face above us. At the top, the Château Frontenac rose in front of us like something from a different century, which technically it is.

We found the church used in Catch Me If You Can. We walked the boardwalk along the cliff with the St. Lawrence spreading out below, still carrying chunks of ice from the winter. We ate maple syrup poured hot onto a stick and hardened in the snow, a treat so simple and so perfect it almost felt like a trick.

On the drive back I watched the Plains of Abraham pass outside the window and thought about Acadian Driftwood by The Band, a song built around exactly this landscape and its history. It felt surreal in the best possible way. We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant that night, full and tired and quietly amazed at the day.

Le Cartet, Denis's breakfast recommendation, was fantastic. Poached eggs, granola, fresh fruit, a latte with actual art in the foam. The kind of breakfast that sets the tone for a whole day.

We walked from there down to the waterfront, past Canadian flags snapping in the cold air, past government buildings that looked like they'd been there since Confederation. The "I Love Montréal" sign at the Old Port gave us our first real couple photo with the city behind us, both of us grinning in a way that had nothing to do with posing.

The hop-on hop-off bus came next, taking us past the Formula 1 circuit, stopping at the Olympic Stadium where Heather got her solo shot in front of that extraordinary leaning tower, then up to Mount Royal. The storm's damage was visible everywhere up there: branches down across paths, trees split and lying across the grass, the park looking like it had taken a hit it was still processing. The city had kept moving anyway. So had we.

Our last morning started with ambition. Back home the forsythia was probably already blooming. Here, we pulled on every layer we'd packed and walked from the hotel up past McGill University into a proper Canadian morning, navigating on near-empty phone data, heading to St-Viateur Bagel, one of Montréal's most famous institutions. We didn't mind the cold. Not even a little.

The bagels were fresh but small and dense, nothing like what we'd built up in our heads. Montréal bagels are their own thing. New York bagels are better. There. Said it.

From there we found coffee, warmed up, and made our way to Schwartz's Deli on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, where Marianne had told us we absolutely had to go. Established in 1928, walls covered in framed newspaper clippings, the kind of place that has earned every inch of its reputation.

The smoked meat sandwich arrived piled high on rye bread with a giant pickle alongside it. After the bagel disappointment, it hit exactly right. They had Cherry Bite soda. Of course they did.

Then Notre-Dame Basilica. Nothing prepares you for the interior of that building. The vaulted ceiling is painted a deep blue-green and covered in gold stars, lit from below in electric blue. The altar is gilded and intricate beyond reason. The pipe organ fills an entire wall. We stood inside quietly for a long time, two people from North Carolina who had walked out of spring and into winter and into one of the most beautiful spaces either of us had ever seen.

We left that trip knowing something we hadn't known before: that we could do this. Navigate a foreign country. Handle phones that don't work, restaurants that don't take cards, storms that cancel plans, bosses who appear unexpectedly in foreign cities. Figure it out together, in real time, without it ruining anything.

Montréal threw a lot at us for a first international trip. The weather, the language, the logistics, the constantly rearranging plans. And we loved it anyway. Or maybe because of it.

I've been back to Montréal several times since for work. It's become one of my favorite cities in the world. I think I know why. It's the city that showed us what we were made of as travelers, and as a couple. You tend to love places that do that.