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My Olympics / F1 Race

Sadly, this post is late. The experiences in question happened during the Olympics, and would have been so much more appropriate to post then. But such is life.

I’d gone many times to Île Sainte Hélène, but I’d never been to the other island that includes portions of Parc Jean-Drapeau: Île Notre-Dame.

So I set out on a Bixi, down through the Vieux Port, and along the same route as I took when going to Parc de Dieppe. When I was taking a break before venturing onto the Concorde Bridge, a heavily tattooed guy (face and all) came over and struck up a conversation. He was a surfer who had just spent an hour on the Habitat 67 Break. We talked about surfing, the language wars (he’s a native Francophone Montrealer), the changing face of the Vieux Port, fishing, and more. We wished one another à bientôt, and he headed back towards the port and I headed onto the bridge.

Despite it being a fine (if hot) day, there wasn’t much traffic. I crossed the main channel of the St. Lawrence, and then took the Pont des Îles to cross over to Island of Our Lady.

This island has more parkland with trees and grassy lawns and picnic tables, but also has some remnants of the Expo 67 (like the Canada Pavilion) and the Casino (which had been the Palace of Civilizations during the Expo).

I thought I’d explore the south-west tip of the island, and followed a nice bike path. Before long, however, it reached a construction area and a sign for the bike path detour. This detour made me wonder if I had passed through some portal into another world … it got wilder and wilder.

When the trail was narrowest, I started seeing warnings for poison ivy. I was getting ready to turn back when it opened out into a clearing, and in the clearing there was a bridge and a chipper young man sitting at a table under a colorful umbrella. The chipper young man demanded my tickets (in French, then English) and I was confused. He patiently explained in English that the path led to the beach, admission was by ticket only and I could get them back on the other island for $8.26, but bikes were not permitted. (This made me wonder about the poison ivy signs along the trail, ’cause if you’d cut through the brush, you’d be out on that beach …. hmmmm).

Instead of going to the beach, I went on my F1 Race. Which is to say, I followed the bike detour back, cut across a lawn, and encountered a lot of very serious cyclists whipping by on a broad piece of road. There were some other, slower cyclists, so I figured I’d go with the flow. This road, the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, is where they run the Canada Grand Prix. I can tell you, I reached speeds of up to 20km/hour on this thrilling course!

Leaving the Grand-Prix course at Turn 10 L’ Epingle (The Hairpin), I briefly crossed Passerelle du Cosmos to ditch my Bixi bike at the station there, then resumed exploring on foot.

Shortly beyond Turn 10, I crossed abandoned-looking concrete and went up some stairs into a pavilion. The pavilion oversees the Olympic Basin, where the rowing events were held for the 1976 Olympics. Today, people use the basin for training, canoeing, rowing, and dragon boats. The empty stands, however, are a pretty evocative place.

Leaving the Pavilion, there’s a very retro-futuristic view of the Biosphere.

I continued on foot as far as I could up towards the foot of the Jacques Cartier bridge, but the island gets increasingly industrial and at one point the road is fenced off entirely. So I turned around and went back to Île Sainte Hélène to take the metro back to my home base. Around the metro station, the ÎleSoniq Music Festival was getting set up, and hundreds of young people in flashy (yet very minimal) outfits were emerging from the station while the ground shook with repeated “chèque un … chèque deux … chèque trois” from the PA.

Not being in my twenties and still hoping to preserve my hearing for another few years, I turned away from the excitement, descended into the metro, and returned to the apartment.

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