(using the apartment’s towel rack to wind some Mountain Mohair)

First, can I just say that it is so good to be home?  We went to Montreal for two reasons, really.  One is that without physically removing ourselves from home and work, we have a really hard time not working.  Second, when we do travel, we travel to eat, and Montreal proved itself last year to be a city of good eats.  Being away from work was very successful, and we returned recharged for a new year.  This year, though, with a home pantry stocked with raw milk, root veggies from our garden and our winter CSA share, local meats, and our own grain – eating anywhere else is pretty disappointing.  We could not find a loaf of true whole wheat bread in any of the fine bakeries we visited, and my tummy literally hurt from the switch to white flour.

I missed our compost pile, too.  Sound nuts?  Well, sure, but at this point in my life it makes me sort of ill to throw food scraps into a trash bin, instead of feeding them to our dogs, chickens, or at least the compost.  (We actually did bring a lot of food scraps home for the dogs!)   At home, we feed our two dogs and cat homemade food – extra bread from the bakery, soaked grains, veggies, and once or twice a week, raw meat (”scrap” meats like pigs feet).  (Actually, we hardly feed the cat – he mostly kills his own dinner – love that!- and scavenges veggies from the kitchen.  It’s amazing what domestic animals will eat when you’re not stuffing them full of junk.)  While we were away we left a bag of commercial dog food for them, and boy did they get fat – just in a week!  They were as relieved as we were to be eating well again.

Our favorite outing in Montreal was probably to the Biodome, where you can walk through several ecosystems, including a Tropical Rainforest and the Arctic.  We saw everything from crocodiles to penguins, up close – like the bird above, who was walking around on the railings.  It was really cool.

Our least favorite outing?  Going to the glass repair shop, to fix our car window.  One bummer about Montreal in the winter is that the limited parking is basically halved at times, as they empty one half of the streets for snow removal.  We spent several nights parking in spots where we weren’t exactly sure if we might get towed.  On one of those nights, parked on a much busier street than the quiet residential neighborhood where we were staying, we did not get towed, but we did get our window smashed in for theft.  Darn.

Next year, I think we may pack a bunch of food from home and just go to a cabin in the woods somewhere.  Montreal really is a lovely, friendly, beautiful place, but all we really needed was this: