Umbrellas were no longer necessary by the time we left mass at Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal and began exploring the cobblestone streets of Old Montreal and eventually the Latin Quarter, where we found a street where apparently umbrellas regularly fly away.
At the underground city, there's a wide LED wall of illuminated images or light patterns which change regularly and definitely grabbed my attention each time we passed.
My favorite art exhibit, however, was a sculpting of a millennial surfing the internet on a bus bench.
Only if you take the time to see the world from his perspective do you realize he's reading a memorial for the guiding light of Apple.
The computer screen reveals: "Steve Jobs Est Mort 1955 to 2011."
That simple message that death comes to us all eventually is a good reminder to look around and live.
As I've reflected many times, it seems when walking around that far too many people seem more concerned with what's on their computers than with reality.
It's one reason why cruises to foreign lands often feel so much more relaxing than land vacations closer to home.
However, I have to confess that I too regularly check the internet, and that afternoon when we returned to our hotel to rest up before going out for the evening, I did a bit of cruise research and replied to emails using the free internet at our hotel.
After refreshing, we returned to Bistro a JoJo, a blues bar we'd passed while walking through the Latin Quarter, for a night on the town.
Okay, "night on the town" for us these days means something considerably different than it means for our kids.
One reason we chose to return to Bistro a JoJo was an acoustic duo scheduled to perform between 5 and 9 with free admission before a full band rocked the place for the real late night party people.
It had a great vibe.
We snagged what I'd call the best seats in the house, sitting at the front of an elevated seating section that gave us a clear view of the stage. When we went to dinner while the duo took a break between sets (JoJo's doesn't serve food), we returned to find the exact same seats again.
Andrée Dupré and Jean Millaire played a great combination of blues and rock, including both well-known and obscure songs.
Millaire's guitar licks were solid, which could be expected from a professional guitarist old enough to have been one of the performers I saw forty years ago on my first trip, but he also used the new loop technology, where he'd start a song laying down the basic rhythm tracks into a recorded loop so that he could then come back and play other guitar parts to produce a very full sound.
Dupré's raspy alto voice shredded the vocal parts like the love child of Janis Joplin and Louis Armstrong.
We loved it.
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