Chris Halverson’s Blog

I had spent the first couple of days in Montreal with my wife sightseeing and such. On Sunday I got up bright and early to go to the Grand Prix. I donned my Ferrari shirt and cap, went down for a big breakfast and headed for the subway. I had bought tickets the day before so I could avoid any lines. Of course I did not ask about the schedule, so I ended up waiting in the station for 20 minutes before the subway came. Earlier in the morning somebody had decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. While waiting for my train they drove the “suicide” train through the station. Kind of morbid, you could see blood on the front and the window was cracked. I make it to the transfer station and join about 10,000 other people jumping on the train to the island.

Once there it’s a short 20 minute walk to my grandstand. Along the way I watch as some guy is climbing the outside of the biodome. The cops are all over the place trying to figure out a way to get him down. I make it over to see where my grandstand is and since I’m 90 minutes early I stake out a place on the ground in the shade to relax for a bit. I read through my program, listen to my audio book and just try to stay cool for a bit.

Fifteen minutes before the start I make it up to my seat and am loving the view. I’m very close to the top in Grandstand 34, inside the hairpin. To top it off, I’m on the end of the row along the stairs. I start talking with the couple next to me for a bit before the race starts. I get out the camera and get ready to start taking pictures. I also get out my scanner and get ready to listen to ITV’s broadcast and potentially some driver communications.

The weather was beautiful. It was about 75F and sunny, the track was in great shape and the place was packed. It was the second highest attended race at 117,000. Ironically, the highest attended one was when I went in 2002 at 120,000.

The race was great, at least from my point of view. Ferrari and Michael Schumacher won, which is what I wanted. There was some good overtaking at the hairpin as well as Massa’s scary straight on crash into the wall. Thankfully the safety crew got there almost immediately and he was fine. Even better was that Williams got disqualified in the end Actually, I wasn’t happy about that, I like Montoya and want to see him be able to compete.

At the end of the race I decided to brave the Metro for my ride back. In 2002 I went to the Metro station, saw the huge crowd, and decided I could find a better way back. Needless to say, I didn’t. I found a bridge the appeared to go straight into downtown. Uhh…no. About halfway over it takes a sharp turn and goes on for another eternity. At that time I had run out of water and the weather was much hotter. It felt like a death march. Some of you know what bridge I’m talking about, it was crazy.

Anyway, I queue up in the line for the metro (after my 20 minute walk to get there). For the next hour I move forward at the rate of about 1 step every 5 minutes. It literally took me an hour to go the about 100 yards to get to the station. Once inside the station I got turned around and got on the wrong train. I went to the end of the line and had to buy another ticket to go back (just one stop). Doh! I was pissed at first, but in the end it actually probably saved me a ton of time as the line to get on the correct train was huge. The extra $2 was worth it. The ride back was crowded, but uneventful.

All in all, the race was great. I still think they need to find a better way to get the people off the island. It’s just crazy and takes forever. This is very much in contrast to Indianapolis (see USGP Trip Report).

Montreal as a whole is a great city. We stayed closer to downtown (near Rue St. Catherine, about 4 blocks or so from Crescent St.) which provided us the opportunity to walk to many places. This is very different than what we are used to in suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul. It was fun though, it’s just too bad that we did not figure out where everything was until about 3 days into the trip.

We had a wonderful sushi dinner at Sato. I’ve never really had sushi before and it was wonderful. Service was great and so was the food. Highly recommended.

The big dinner was a Queue de Cheval. We had gone here last time and could not wait to get back. The service was incredible as was the food. The servings are huge and the food is delicious. We couldn’t finish it all, but we brought it along as we were staying at a Residence Inn and had a full kitchen in our “apartment”. Of course, we went to the bar after dinner and when we got back (after a couple of drinks) I accidently left the food in the car overnight. Doh! Highest recommendation to go to Queue de Cheval.

We went to the botanical gardens on our second to last day and enjoyed a great day there. Weather was beautiful again and it was very relaxing. All in all we had a great, relaxing vacation. Montreal is a great city.

General Montreal pics

2004 Grand Prix of Canada pics

Next up: Indy!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 9:49 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.