Tuesday, 17 September 2013 Day1 Sydney to Montreal

We were transferred by limousine to Sydney Airport where we picked up our business class  Air Canada flight to Vancouver . The flight was enjoyable with good food and the ability to stretch out and sleep which was amazing. Our flight was running behind time and with a screening machine out of action at Montreal Airport we raced to catch our connecting flight to Montreal although once on the plane we once again settled down for an enjoyable flight.

On arrival at Montreal we were transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in the centre of Montreal. Even though we had travelled through the night because of time changes we arrived on Tuesday, 17 September 2013, the same day we departed from Sydney Australia.

The Queen Elizabeth Hotel (French: Le Reine Élizabeth; official English name Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth) is a grand hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Completed in 1958, it was built by the Canadian National Railway and managed for many years by Hilton Hotels. CN Hotels were later sold to Canadian Pacific Hotels, which is now known as Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. With 1039 rooms and 21 floors it is the largest hotel in the province of Quebec, and the second largest Fairmont hotel in Canada after the Royal York in Toronto, which has 1365 rooms.

Located at 900 René Lévesque Boulevard West, in the heart of Montreal, it is connected to Central Station and to the underground city.

Many famous guests have stayed there, including Queen Elizabeth II (four times) and the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Prince Charles, Fidel Castro, who was the first head of state to visit the hotel, Charles de Gaulle, and Princess Grace of Monaco, during Expo '67, Indira Gandhi, Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Perry Como, Joan Crawford, John Travolta, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and George W. Bush.

The hotel reached worldwide fame when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had been refused entry into the United States, conducted their Bed-In in Room 1742 at the hotel between May 26 and June 2, 1969. "Give Peace a Chance" was recorded in this room on June 1 by André Perry. This song is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and became an anthem of the American anti-war movement during the 1970s. It peaked at #14 on theBillboard Hot 100 and #2 on the British singles chart.

The NHL Entry Draft was also held at the hotel ten times between 1963 and 1979.

In 1970, the Quebec government moved its centre of operations into the Queen Elizabeth in the midst of the October Crisis.

There was controversy over naming the hotel: Quebec nationalists wanted it called Château Maisonneuve in honour of Montreal's founder, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve. CN's president, Donald Gordon, insisted it be named for the queen, who had unexpectedly come to the throne in 1952 while the hotel was still on the drawing boards.

The French name, Le Reine Élizabeth, may appear startling because of the use of the masculine article le. The article does not apply to the feminine noun Reine but to the understood masculine noun Hôtel.


After settling in we walked around the city and found we were next door the Mary Queen of the World Basilica, a very impressive church which we looked at the next day. We decided to buy pulled pork rolls with bacon and a stick maple syrup sauce from one of the many food trucks that lined the city streets for dinner and sat in a nearby park to eat them.