Thursday night in Montreal

Hello everyone,
Well, we have a little more of "home" travelling with us to Montreal and once again Pat and I are thankful to have our friends with us. We have our friend Tanis walking with us and our friends Patti and Deb crewing for us. We are very excited to have our "crew" back with us.
We all live in the Aurora so we arrange to car pool to the airport and on the way we will pick Pat up at the office. So I pick everyone up and we are barely one exit south on the 404 on the laughing has already begun. We are not even at the airport yet and my cheeks are sore from laughing. I call Pat on the road to tell her we are on our way and Joanne (our receptionist) can not even hear me because of the laughing in the background. She knows we are all "trouble" and you will see how right she was.
We arrive in Montreal safe and sound and then it begins. We go to the car rental to pick up our car (Impala) and they give us a Buick (Alure? but a smaller car). Why I am telling you this?...you will see later. When you travel with five women, two who pack like Pat and Tanis, anything smaller than a mini van is tight. So we pack the car and are about to drive off when I realize that we reserved a GPS for our crew to get around Montreal. So I jump out of the car and run back into AVIS to get the GPS. Again, there is a reason why I am telling you this. So the fellow gives me the GPS and I jump in the passenger seat and set up the GPS. Why I am in the passenger seat?...well, I have rented the car under my name but I have added Deb and Patti as second drivers so Deb is driving out of the airport. Well the GPS system (we have named her "Alice" from "The Honeymooners") has us going around in a circle around the airport. So we tell her.."To the moon Alice"...hence the name but we eventually get "Alice" on track and she leads us to the hotel.
Tanis has a cousin (Elaine) who lives close to Montreal and she has agreed to meet us in the lobby of the hotel and have dinner with us. Elaine had said she had heard good things about La Pizzella and we all agreed it sounded good. So off we head to Elaine's car... to drive to the restaurant and it she be no problem there is six of us in a Suzuki. So as we stand beside this sub compact car we all do a "weight tally" in our heads and needless to say I was offered the passenger seat by my "friends". I wasn't complaining though. So Pat, Patti and Deb sit in the backseat and Tanis is stretched out across them her head resting comfortably on Deb. We howled all the way to the restaurant. If we were stopped by the police I think we would of had them laughing so hard we would not of received a ticket. Then again...
We arrive at this very nice and QUIET restaurant and I immediately feel sorry for the people around us because we are on a "roll" tonight. However, the people of Montreal love to laugh and thankfully they are patient with us and eventually we make "friends" with the tables around us. So we order our dinners and everyone orders something different so we can all have some of each others. The appetizers arrive and we all agree that Patti and Deb's gorgonzola pasta is the best of the rest. We have a long discussion during dinner about how "sexy" this appetizer is in our quietest voices. Perhaps that's when we started to meet our new friends in the tables around us. Our dinner topic was very interesting.
The staff at the restaurant were excellent and we had a lot of fun with them. The rest of the meal was excellent and I would highly recommend this spot if you are going for dinner in Montreal. It was so good we were going to go back on Sunday but it was closed. In the end though it all works out and we found another spot that was just as fun. More on that later.
Our first night in Montreal was so much fun and very memorable. It set the "bar" for the rest of the weekend and we only raised it from there.
Thanks to Elaine for having dinner with us and I hope we did not embarass you too much! To Deb, Tanis, Patti and Pat...man oh man that was fun. Thanks for the laughs.
With love and thanks,
M.J.