We visited Montreal December 26, 2018 – January 1, 2019 and spent one night in Mont-Tremblant (almost 2 full days). Before we get into the nitty gritty details of our trip, we wanted to first give a few highlights and recommendations if you ever want to visit Montreal:

• Jean-Talon Market located near Little Italy
• Ice skating (if you go in the winter, try to go to a natural rink, but if not possible, the refrigerated rink in Old Port was a lot of fun)
• If you’re not driving, utilize the public transportation. We did not take the bus, but their subway system is great and very easy to use!
• Pack warmly if visiting in the winter. We walked a lot and often wore snowpants while we were out just to keep warm.
• Visit Mont-Tremblant – it’s easy to get there by bus from Montreal. No need to stay at the resort unless you absolutely want to. There are Airbnbs near by. Expect a decent amount of people at the resort, but there’s plenty to do for everyone.
• Visit Old Port — at least walk around. You get a European feel in that part of the city.

Day 1: We arrived in Montreal the day after Christmas around 10:30 am. We were able to check into our Airbnb when we arrived, which was super nice. Our Airbnb hosts were very friendly and were willing to help us with any questions we had. They even bought a frozen pizza for us “in case of emergencies”. Because we were spending 2 days in Mont-Tremblant during our trip, we decided to hit the ground running and explored Montreal shortly after we checked into our Airbnb. Our Airbnb was a 10 minute walk from 2 metro stations, which was very convenient. We took the metro to go towards Old Montreal/Old Port and went to the Notre Dame Basilica. Small line outside to get inside. There was a $6 CAD charge (cash only!) per person and you could do 20 minute guided tour if you wanted to. We opted not to, and just walked around the church and took pictures. Very beautiful! There were quite a lot of tourists. After the Basilica we decided to get our souvenir shopping done and bought a few gifts for ourselves and parents. We continued our day by walking throughout the city, mostly in Old Montreal. Understandably, we had to go to Tim Horton’s on our first day there! We ate every variety of Timbit available…quite yummy, and we decided chocolate was our favorite. We then took the metro the McCord Museum, which is dedicated to Canadian history. The museum is free to visit on Wednesday nights from 5-9, which definitely played a part in our decision to go there. Other museums are free or significantly cheaper on Wednesday evenings from 5-9. The museum was interesting to say the least. The first floor was dedicated to the history of the native peoples of Canada. The second floor was..we can’t even put it into words. It was a special exhibit called “Enchanted Worlds” and was a mechanical window display like one you could see in Ogilvy’s, a department store. We had considered cooking dinner at our Airbnb that night, but were pretty hungry after the museum, so we decided to ask the employee at the museum of any recommendations. She recommended a pizza place called Moleskine, which was a 15 minute walk from the museum. We decided to go, and it was an amazing recommendation.

Day 2: We took an early bus to Mont-Tremblant, which took a little under 3 hours to get there (arrived around 10am). The bus station in Mont-Tremblant (M-T) was a Shell gas station. Our Airbnb host picked us up from the station and although we were not able to check in yet, they allowed us to keep our bags at the house. We had reservations to go ice climbing at 1pm, so we quickly changed into our snow clothes and our Airbnb host drove us to a creperie called Creperie Catherine nearby and oh my goodness, it did not disappoint. We each got a breakfast crepe, and they were absolutely delicious. If you go to M-T, we highly, highly recommend this place. After breakfast, we took the local bus up to the ski resort and made our way to go ice climbing (it was a little stressful to get everything straight but it all worked out). We went ice climbing with two other young men, so it was a nice small group. The instructor was nice, although he really didn’t instruct very much. We spent about two hours doing that. It was challenging, but a lot of fun. We walked around the rest of the ski resort and stopped at a cafe for coffee and pastries. We took the local bus back to our Airbnb that evening and that was certainly an adventure. We had no idea when our stop was as the driver did not announce any stops and we had no idea when to pull the bell to get off, so when the last person got off the bus, we decided we might as well get off too. We tried talking to the bus driver, but he responded in French and said a lot of things and neither of us speak French, so that wasn’t very helpful. We got off the bus and used our phones to see how far we were from the Airbnb and thankfully we were only about 15 minutes away by foot. Our Airbnb was in Saint-Jovite, about 20 minutes from the ski resort. We went to a local restaurant in Saint-Jovite that night called L’Escalope, which was quite delicious. We did a lot of walking that night as we still didn’t really understand the bus system. We walked through the busier area of Saint-Jovite. It was cute and quaint.

Day 3: We had about 7 hours to kill in Mont-Tremblant until our bus ride back to Montreal. We didn’t know what we were going to do until that morning because of the weather. We decided to go snow tubing for a couple hours that afternoon, but not before going back to the creperie place we went to the day before. Unfortunately, though, the wait at the creperie place was 2 hours, and we definitely weren’t going to wait that long. So, we were very grateful that we were able to go there the day before. Thankfully there was a restaurant across the street, and overall, we actually liked that place better (Le Charlotte) – the service was better and the atmosphere was nice and the food was yummy. We called a taxi after breakfast/lunch to take us snow tubing and that was so much fun. Amber had never done anything like that before, so she was pretty stoked. We had a great time and thankfully the weather never got very yucky. We took a taxi back to our Airbnb, where our lovely hosts allowed us to keep our bags after checking out. They even took us to the station to catch the bus back to Montreal. Overall, our hosts in Mont-Tremblant were even better than we could have imagined. We took the bus back to Montreal and arrived around 8 pm that night.

Day 4: We slept in this day a little bit as we had pretty early mornings the last few days. We started our day by going to the Marche Jean-Talon (this is a must go-to place). It’s one of the oldest and biggest farmers markets in Montreal. It also wasn’t super touristy, but it was pretty busy. We tried lots of fresh fruit and vegetable samples, bought macarons, ate poutine, bought maple leaf candies, and bought potatoes and greens beans for dinner that evening. We then explored Little Italy and walked through a few parks, which were very icy, but fun. We stopped for a little snack at a Latino supermarket where we ate Argentine empanadas and a tamale. The employee who took our order didn’t really speak English, so Amber used her Spanish skills and ordered food for us. It was quite comical to be speaking Spanish in Little Italy in Montreal. We decided to take the metro and head to Mont-Royal. It was getting late in the day, but we figured we could make it to that area before the sun set. It was quite chilly outside and by the time we got to the park, we couldn’t go up very high because it was extremely icy. We did get to see some neat views of the city and the park was really cool. We took the metro back to our Airbnb and cooked dinner. After dinner, we went out to Old Port (Old Montreal), for Natrel Fire on Ice. Montreal does fireworks a few Saturday nights during the early winter. Luckily we happened to be in Montreal on one of those Saturdays! We were hoping to ice skate when the fireworks started, but there were so many people, and the rink was packed, so we decided we would come back the next day and ice skate. We found a spot for the fireworks, and had a great view. It was fun to watch fireworks just for the heck of it. We decided to ride the ferris wheel, and although it was expensive, it was definitely worth it. We had great views of the city and took some pretty cool pictures. We paid a little over 20 a person, but we did get to ride on it for about 15-20 minutes, which was more than we expected honestly. Since we didn’t get to go to the top of Mont-Royal, we were glad to have ridden the ferris wheel where we could get great views of the city. We ended the night by going to a cafe and got some hot chocolate and pastries. We wanted to warm up a bit and catch the last few minutes of the Washington Capitals game on our phones. It was a long day for us and we walked over 10.5 miles, but it was a lot of fun.

Day 5: We wanted to go ice skating on the natural rink at Parc La Fontaine, but it was closed due to it still not being frozen enough. We decided to go to the refrigerated rink, but couldn’t figure out how to rent skates. We walked to the natural rink and saw a few people skating on the edges. We decided to walk across it, which was still pretty fun. We went to Old Port and got some lunch (which of course included poutine). We then went ice skating at the rink at Old Port (where we were the previous night). There were a decent amount of people, but it was nothing like the previous night. We skated for an hour, which was a lot of fun. We fit right in with the people there since we are both pretty good skaters (Dylan is better). Afterwards, we explored Old Montreal since we didn’t really have the chance to explore that area during the day yet. We cooked dinner at our Airbnb that evening. That night, we went out to a different part of Montreal that we had not seen yet. We went to the 9th annual Luminotherapie at Place des Festivals near the Musee D’Art Contemporain de Montreal (Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal). There were giant dominoes that lit up and made noise when you knocked them down. It was very different, but pretty neat. We decided to walk around the area after Luminotherapie since we hadn’t visited there before and we came across the big shopping area of Montreal. We were glad we decided to walk around, since we hadn’t seen that part of Montreal yet.

Day 6: Our final full day in Montreal. When we woke up, we didn’t really have any set plans except for going to St-Viateur Bagel & Cafe, which is a pretty famous bagel place in Montreal. It’s cash only! Unless you have a Canadian debit card. We didn’t know this when we got there, but luckily there was an ATM five minutes away by foot. There was a wait at the cafe. We waited about 20 minutes to be seated. They had a pretty extensive menu (lots of bagel sandwiches), but we both just wanted to try the bagels by themselves. Dylan’s experience was significantly better than Amber’s. Amber wanted a plain bagel with cream cheese, which they were out of, so she quickly decided to get the multi grain one, which she didn’t really care for. Dylan tried the sesame seed and cinnamon raisin and ordered regular cream cheese and apple cinnamon cream cheese. The sesame seed bagel was clasically good, but the cinnamon raisin with the apple cinnamon cream cheese was delicious. Do we recommend this place? Yes, you might as well try it if you like bagels as Montreal is supposed to be known for bagels. We think it’s safe to say that if you want to sit down, you can probably expect at least a bit of a wait.

Thank you for taking the time to read our post! Please check out the Gallery section of our site of pictures of Montreal and other random trips. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments you may have! 🙂