(I will be in Sapporro from Friday to Tuesday, then walking/riding-trains to Muroran on the south coast of Hokkaidō1. Before returning home I’ll make my now normal stop in Seoul, from Wednesday the fourth to the eighth. If you are around, join me for a walk in Japan, or if in Seoul, for a night at the Woodstock vinyl bar in Sillim.)

Montreal is good, very good.

When stuck in parties with the wealthy comparing homes, I used to say that I summered in El Paso and wintered in Montreal, only a slight exaggeration. I did spend a lot of time in each during those seasons, because both were my favorite cities in North America, and I prefer to be in a place in the full bloom of its essence.

I’ve already written about El Paso, but I’ve been saving Montreal for when I wanted a positive relaxing trip, and this last weekend wasn’t supposed to be that. Rather, I’d come on a personal trip, for a micro reunion with three college friends whom I’d not seen in a decade, but an illness left me by myself for two days in the city I’d not seen in over a decade.

I hadn’t intended to go to Montreal directly after writing a piece comparing Europe to the US, although it makes perfect sense, since Montreal is a combination of each, and if you like the city as I do, then it has the best of each, and if you don’t, then it has the worst of each.

My prior quip about Montreal was that it was like if Paris and Baltimore had a love child raised by Ottawa, and after wandering it again for two days, I stand by that.

From Paris, Montreal has inherited far more than just language. Its cafe culture bursts into splendor each spring when the snow melts and bespoke decks pop up in front of each restaurant, cafe, and bar, and the whooshing of cars gives over to the buzz of the social

These decks, taken down in late October and rebuilt by the owners themselves, often with rather shoddy work, cannibalize over half the parking spots on many streets. That this can happen, and is celebrated rather than fought over, represents the best of its European side.

Yet Montreal isn't fully a European city, and not just because of geography. It shares America's values of personal success and individual liberty, and so there’s more diversity, more "characters," while also appearing more like a US city.

If you plug your ears, you can walk long stretches and think you are in a slightly warped Baltimore, with a gritty downtown harbor, streets littered with garbage, a few districts dedicated to strip clubs, and then residential neighborhoods of quiet streets of row homes, with small backyards accessing super thin, drainage alleys.

The most noticeable difference is that the white marble stoops of Baltimore row-homes have been replaced by long steep spiral metal staircases, which give the neighborhoods an even more industrial feel.

Montreal is a pretty city, but that's primarily due to its location on a river island punctuated with the perfect sized city mountain, because at the built level the American side has won, trumping a Parisian attempt to accessorize the dominant somber, joyless, and brutal utilitarianism.

That Montreal style, modern brutalism, is most obvious in its metro stations, although the best example of it is the Olympic Park stadium, where the Expos baseball team used to play, which I sadly don't have pictures of (but you can google) because on my second day I lost my camera.

After my camera disappeared, the rains came, and so I spent my last day reading alone at a cafe before my friends arrived and that became the focus. So, I'll wait for another time to write more about why Montreal is so great, although that shouldn’t stop anyone from going. I still count it as one of my two favorite cities in North America.

I do want to explain briefly why I've not been in over a decade, which is only partly due to breaking my ankle there on my penultimate trip, in February 2014.

From about 2007 to 2015 I used to try and go to Montreal at least twice a year since it was only a pleasant five-hour drive from NYC, and a relaxing contrast to my work in the Bronx, as well as having an amusement park my children liked.

This second to last trip I was alone. During the winters I like to go to Mount Royal park to watch the ice skaters and skiers while drinking coffee in the second floor cafe, but this time I was goaded into trying to skate for the first time in my life by two elderly women next to me. They succeeded, because if they could do it so could I, and so I stepped out onto the ice and within minutes realized I'd made a mistake and while the two elderly women looped past my struggling self, with big smiles, waves, and their scarves fluttering in the wind, I baby stepped off where a skate stuck between rubber mats and I snapped my ankle. I lay there until some guy who felt bad for me (whom I never saw again) dropped me off at the hospital. The ER gave me ketamine, which set off a darkly bad trip where I thought I was being buried alive, and then the hospital shoved me out the door at one a.m. with a big bottle of pain killers they've banned in the US, because they are addictive. When a few days later I tried to get surgery the anesthesiologist asked for $500 in cash, which he told me I could get from an ATM a few blocks away (lol). So instead I spent a week in my motel room zonked out, watching the Sochi winter Olympics, trying to figure out how to get home until I finally I paid the Algerian hotel manger (who wanted compensation in cartons of Marlboro Reds) to take me and my car home, and for his return flight.

That somehow captures Montreal for me, and despite the pain it wasn’t the reason I stopped coming back. That instead was when on my next trip the Canadian border-crossing guards, thinking I was coming too much, so must be running drugs detained me for four hours, took my van apart, and opened my phone and computer. They even removed my tires, and pried off the heels of my church shoes, because why not.

I’m not sure what side that petty thuggishness represents, but I’ll go with Paris, because I lived in Baltimore for six years, like it, and think it gets piled on too much.

PS: I forgot to pack shorts this trip, so the cover photo is from my walk to WalMart. That at least, I’ll give to Baltimore. The flags on the scooters though, those are Paris.

Logistics of long walks

(If details of travel and hiking isn’t your thing, skip to next section.)

I get a lot of questions about the logistics of walking, and travel, and while I’ve covered it before (How to walk two-hundred miles, how to walk, how to travel), I’ve changed a few things, especially for this walk across Lombardy, that are worth noting.

The biggest change has been in my backpack, which I’ve upgraded because I realized what I am doing is similar to thru-hiking2, and so I stole some ideas from that community, including a list of the best backpacks. I chose the Hyperlite Windrider because it’s waterproof, but also because I like the lack of internal structure.

It’s less of a backpack, and more of a large plastic bag you stuff your things in, and if you already organize your things (rolling up your clothes, putting loose items like electronics in plastic sandwich bags), then it offers the most space for the least weight.

It’s absolutely wonderful because it is a larger version of a thirty-year-old pack that got me around the world eight times, which I’ve brought out of retirement, and now stuff into the larger bag like a nested Russian doll, with additional items on top of it. So now I have both a smaller around-the-town bag and a larger “carry everything across the country” bag.

The other change is the Teva sandals you see in the second picture are gone for long cross-country walks. I still use them for around-town walks, but I’ve switched to KEEN men's Targhee II boots because my podiatrist insisted. That I had a podiatrist to insist is ninety percent of the reason I’ve switched, because while I love the Tevas, they simply don’t offer enough support for off-road hiking.

I still pack light — resembling a cartoon character that always wears one uniform — with my total backpack weighing around twenty five pounds.3

I've now done ten of these longer walks and this was the first where I made the mistake of heading east (from Milan to Padua), and so the sun was in my face for most of the time and that meant sunburn, and that's what ended this trip short of finishing. Which explains the sun hat in the photo, bought from a fishing store. The take-home message from all of this is never walk east, always west, if you have a choice.

The last, and most important advice, is how to choose your exact route. I wrote about how AI can help sift through all the options, but in the end, you can’t rely on it, or other sites like Komoot, because while both are useful, they make big mistakes and so you can end up trying to cross a bridge with no sidewalk, shoulder, or really any space at all that wouldn’t put your life at risk. Or you will find that a new golf course has been built and it’s fenced in so you can’t cross it and instead have to turn around because the only other option is a highway.

That means spending hours using Google view as well as its satellite option to see if there really is a walkable path where they claim there is, and then making the necessary changes.

You can see my exact walk for my last trip on Komoot (Milan day one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten) if you want to copy it, or get a sense of what’s involved.

As usual, if you want to do a similar walk you can always reach out to me and we can talk over the phone or zoom about it. I offer this to every paid subscriber and so far about thirty of you have taken me up on it. I’ve enjoyed all of them because I’ve also learned a lot from each of them.

Bad Delta

I don't like complaining about bad flights, because I'm still delighted by the whole "get on a plane in one country and be in another country in less than a day without paying an arm and a leg" thing. We live in a wondrous age and no amount of travel will numb me of that.

Yet my last flight, Delta from Milan to Atlanta, was bad in a way that highlights one of my frustrations with large global companies, including airlines, which is that they have lost their human component, eroded by centralized efficiency.

This flight went fine for the first nine and a half hours, and then as we began our descent the plane did a quick u-turn and the pilot came on to say we were low on fuel (!!!) and were going to land in Charlotte instead, and don't worry it wouldn't be that big a deal.

What actually happened was indeed a big deal, one full of chaos, confusion, and bad information for the next nine hours. We didn't get into Atlanta until over twenty hours after we left, now flying with an entirely new crew. I, and many others, missed my connection and had to stay in a sterile airport-adjacent hotel and catch the next day's flight.

Initially I couldn't put my finger on why it was all so annoying, beyond the obvious. Then I realized that while almost all individual employees involved were great, and tried to be helpful, they collectively failed, because we passengers were herded from crew to crew to another incoming crew like disoriented sheep, as the employees involved timed out and became "not involved." This happened with no connective tissue or memory between transitions.

The crews' well-being comes first in modern aviation, which from a safety perspective makes sense. So when a flight goes badly and runs on way too long (as ours did), the crews that started "time out" from the process. And they really do “time out” as ours did immediately on landing in Charlotte, and drop away entirely, and the customers are placed into the hands of next incoming crew, who while individually nice, have little knowledge about what happened before.

The memory of what you have endured is gone. The only recourse to that memory in the system is the bureaucratic (go to the app or phone line) and everyone hates that, including the crews, because it is unresponsive, and the person on the other end rarely has more information than what is in a spreadsheet.

In the past, employees as in most service industries, stayed with their customers through thick and thin because they were literally and figuratively in the "same boat." In the modern airline industry they are not allowed to do that because of safety regulations and company priorities (lower costs), so the only people who have to endure through the entire failed process are the customers.

This bureaucratization isn’t unique to air travel. When I posted about this after my flight, I received responses saying they felt the same way about modern medicine, where you are passed from doctor to doctor. Which might make sense for costs, and even perhaps effectiveness (I doubt that, but I'm open to be convinced), but makes one of the most stressful times in someones life somehow even more clinical and dehumanizing.

So much of the modern world makes you feel like a widget on a conveyor belt, as our fetishization of efficiency has begun to corrode our souls.

Turtles

If you follow me online you know there are two snapping turtles who live in my pond that I feed each summer, who I’ve named Reginald (the larger one) and No-Name4 (the smaller one). The cover photo is Reginald taken at the end of last year.

For the last nine years these two have reliably reappeared each spring, after seven months submerged beneath the mud, muck, and ice of the pond, to snap up hot dogs that I feed them from a stick.

I don’t really remember why I started feeding them, other than thinking it would be cool if the turtles I saw periodically poking their snouts out of the water could be trained like dogs, which is what I managed to do.

That first summer it took about three weeks to get them to come. Initially I placed hot dogs at the edge of the water, enough in to have their scent reach the water, but enough out so that the fish couldn’t get them, and then tapped with a stick, and left. The next morning the hot dogs would be gone. I did this over and over until one evening Reginald appeared, and even came out to get the food, with me there. Below is a slow motion film from last year, which is pretty much how he did it that first day, and has ever since.

When I finally arrived back from my last trip, I went to the usual spot at the edge of the pond, and tapped, expecting nothing because it usually takes at least two days to restart the process, but both turtles came in minutes, and so turtle content has begun.

You can see some videos below, or you can check out my posts on Twitter (where I am far less nuanced and embarrass myself too often.)

I’m not exaggerating when I say seeing them has changed my mood, and made me almost giddily happy. I can’t fully explain why, but at this point, if either of them passed away, or disappeared, I’d be genuinely sad, for awhile.

I've written before about how our bonding with animals makes zero rational sense. We eat some, wholesale slaughter others, and then turn a few into close companions.

That we do that speaks to our deeper need for emotional connection beyond pure logic. We aren't built or designed for lives of pure rationalism. And yes, I'm not above using my irrational attachment to two snapping turtles to suggest the existence of God.

That I am doing that means this is probably where I should end this long grab-bag of a post, before it gets too mushy.

So, until next week. Be safe!

1

Here is my hoped for path: