Day 24. Our last day in Montreal!

Woke soon after five, worrying about the visa, and lay quiet for a couple of hours while the boys snoozed. Gave me time to think things through, and to finish "The Little Stranger", a good suspense novel by Sarah Waters set in a decaying country house in post-war England. That makes eight books in 24 days - both a necessity of camper van life and a real luxury.

We're still staying in our Brossard parking lot, and I took Tom over the road for a haircut without much hope of anything fancy - but it turned out to be an Aveda salon staffed by friendly English speakers. Hooray! Melissa gave Tom a top notch haircut for 14 dollars while giving me lots of advice about where to camp and hike and whale-watch on the Gaspe peninsula. (Which made me even more keen to get out of Dodge). Then Tom got to spend the pocket money he has been carefully accumulating, all 20 dollars of it, at the Toys R Us he had spotted around the corner.


And we decided to make the most of our unwanted extra day here - heading for the top of Montreal - the Parc du Mont Royal which has lofty views over the city, the bridges and the river beyond.

Sunshine, a stroll, and some nice tourist pix, made me feel somewhat more normal again. Much helped by a truly French lunch at The Cafe Cherrier on Rue Saint Denis... We could have been hanging out in a quiet Paris neighbourhood. Tres chic. And vg final impressions of a city that's been marred for us by bad weather and bureaucracy.

I was dreading a refusal at the US consulate but it was smooth sailing - at last. The guards had realised that they recognised me, we had a friendly chat about the Beeb, and they handed over my passports and the precious J visa which states OFFICIALLY that I am a student at Harvard. Yippee!!


Then we departed Montreal (for ever). Big drive east for an hour or so to Drummondsville, where I dropped off the hire car and enjoyed a big supermarket shop for essentials like white wine, peaches and fresh coffee. On another hour past Quebec City. And at half eight in the evening, we scooted into the very last place in an RV park near the town of Beaumont. The Gaspe peninsula - the aim of our trip-lies ahead.


I am looking forward to writing less about me and more about where we are - it'll be good to get beyond obsessing about my immigration status. I heard tonight that a fellow Nieman journalist - the Colombian, Hollman Morris - has been denied a visa by the US, the first such denial in the programme's sixty years.  Our Nieman curator Bob Giles has written a sharp editorial for the L.A. Times - here it is - http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-giles-nieman-morris-20100713,0,3291784.story
- certainly puts this journalist's stresses well in perspective. Good luck to Hollman getting in; I hope he's with us in August.






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