Finally home…
but we had to ditch the car.
It took us a total of three hours to do about 25 km. As you can see from the map, the Montreal West Island may be flat but most of the roads lead to one of the two East-West highways. A burning chemical truck resulted in the closure of highway 40 and, to make things interesting, we had to detour through Lachine to pick up my daughter from an orthodontist appointment.
What was even worse, was that some of the traffic coming from the East was diverted North through Sources in the hope of hooking them up on Gouin. That place is a parking lot even on the best of days. After spending 30 min to move about ten feet on Sources, we gave up, parked the car at a strip mall and walked home. At least we had that option.
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The bottleneck around the airport was one of the driving reasons we opted for the south shore.
OK, that and I still know very little about the west island.
Wow, what a rough ride. But there’s something I don’t understand — your route indicates you ditched the car AFTER you got through the fray. That doesn’t make sense. Please explain.
As we were moving up on Sources, traffic density was getting worse and worse because everybody was trying to turn east on an already packed Gouin boulevard. About 200 meters from my street it simply stopped and we were moving about one car length for every 5 light cycles.
So close and yet so far. We simply gave up, ran over a sidewalk onto a parking lot (having a 4×4 helped) and walked home.
I went back for the car at about 8h30. It was still bumper to bumper and I needed a good 15 min before I could turn into my neighborhood.
Wow!