There has been a St. Patrick's Day parade in Montreal since 1824, and thousands of participants take part each year.
We had toyed with the idea of going to see the St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown Montreal. We felt it would be good to witness it, but we had a long list of things needing to be done, including finding some dining chairs as we have a friend coming to stay next weekend but only had two dining chairs, and did not fancy playing musical chairs every meal time...
Sadly, the list of chores was looking to be winning over the Irish celebrations.
After searching through many adverts on 'Kijiji' (a classified advert website), we eventually found four really nice-looking wooden dining chairs for a bargain price, and arranged to pick them up on Sunday morning.
With the chairs crammed into the car we were on our way back home, when we found ourselves near to the starting point of the parade just thirty minutes before it was due to begin. Seeing as we were there, we decided to have a quick peek at the procession before heading back home to tick more tasks off our list. We parked up, grabbed a coffee and made our way down the street.
Although the sun was out yesterday and the sky was a lovely blue, the temperature was a raw minus fifteen degrees. As we shivered in our thick coats, we felt sorry for those taking part in the parade wearing kilts, especially whilst they were hanging around waiting for it all to start. It was a very different story last year when the temperature apparently reaching a balmy 20 degrees!!
It was great to see everyone getting into the spirit, both human and otherwise...
We stayed and watched a few of the floats, but as we lost feeling in our hands, and our chins turned numb, we decided to leave the hardcore crowd to it and return home.
And the highlight of the parade for T?
Why, it was meeting an authentic Canadian mountie of course!