And so begins my (hopefully) weekly segment Left Hand Adventures! I'm hoping that every weekend we'll be able to drive out to a new section of the city, or its outskirts, that we've never visited before and then report back here about the pretty things we found!
I'd already been thinking about launching some sort of sister blog to this one that would focus a little more on travel than clothing, but with school starting and my budget being what it is, I think the travelling will have to be limited to nearby spots! What I do hope to do though is put together some really thorough travel guides for all the cities we've visited on our different vacations and then post them here as I complete them! So maybe once a month or something my Left Hand Adventure Montreal posts will be replaced by some other place we've been!
We don't have all that many pictures of the place today because I was originally just going to do an outfit post! It was only once Mike and I got to talking about all the stuff we don't know about Montreal that I started putting the idea for this post together in my head!
The French Colonial Government started thinking about the idea of building a canal around 1689 because of the difficulties the Lachine Rapids presented for the trade industry. It wasn't until 1825 that the canal was open to traffic and that the whole South Western part of the city was built up and industrialized. Thanks to this canal all the pretty little borroughs like St-Henri, Point-Saint-Charles and Verdun (which is where I'm moving in October!) even exist! But when the industries got bigger, there was no room for them to expand the canal and it couldn't handle the volume of shipments coming in anymore! So they shut it down and opened up the St-Lawrence Seaway instead! That's why all the creepy abandoned factories along the water are there, and why those neighborhoods still look the way they did about 70 years ago. Business had moved downstream and the South West part of the city was left behind!
Well now the Canal is lined with pretty little artists and vendors and has walking and bike paths that you can stroll along. You can rent row boats and canoes and I suppose it's sort of touristy, but pretty none-the less.
You can also visit the Old Fur Trade museum, built in 1803 to store all the furs that they gathered from the trades. We didn't go in, but the pretty little stone building was really nice!
If you're in the Montreal area, it's only about a 10 minute drive from downtown and it's absolutely worthwhile if you're looking for a peaceful little getaway within the city!
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