La Ronde is Still Open?

At least the ferris wheel was still moving. I pedalled across the Jacques Cartier Bridge to Parc Jean Drapeau (don't know if it's still called Ile Saint Helene. Guess I should check a recent map). The way across the bridge is at least not the narrow channel of terror it used to be a few years ago, with girders at your elbow waiting to tear your skin off. Renovated, it's at least wide enough that pedestrians and cyclists can co-exist, as long as they yell warnings to each other.

However, it has these bars which are set up over the railing, and curve up and over you, exactly like the bear enclosure in an old zoo (thinking of the Riverdale Zoo in Toronto). It's to prevent suicides from jumping off the bridge, but quite depressing in its own right. It also gives you a distracting strobe effect in the eyes, when you are riding through the shadows of the bars.

Anyhow, I made it to Jean Drapeau Park, site of Expo 67, and sat on the shore of the Saint Laurence River. Read Yellow Dog by Martin Amis on the shore, and drew some pictures., below:





Top is a watercolour of the opposite shore, looking downtown. Found out totally by accident that sticking your pinky into the still-wet paint makes a neat wave effect.

Below is a sketch of some rocks soaked by the waves at the shore by my feet, where I saw a crawfish hiding himself in the weeds. He's about in the centre of the picture. Hadn't seen a crawfish in the wild for years, not since I was a kid, and we hunted them on a vacation at a farm in Ontario. Glad they're surviving in the Saint Laurence by downtwon Montreal. They must be food for the herons, when unlucky.