…St.-Anne-de-Bellevue is! Anyone who thinks that we live far from downtown must have never visited the west island and certainly not this little borough on the westernmost tip of the island!
This lovely-looking building is from a lovely little town that is now unfortuantely rated as “so riduculously hard to get to that I will never visit it again” in my books.
Thursday this week one of the members of our lab defended her thesis at the McGill MacDonald campus. I knew it was far out there in the west and I don’t have a car, so my co-worker arranged to pick me up at Pointe Claire Plaza at 9:20. I figured that allowing just over 1 hour would be sufficient. I left at 8:10 AM. We’ve had this jerk of a bus driver who doesn’t seem to understand that we all have to get to work in the morning and takes forever to drive to the metro. Not only that but he kept stopping at the bus stops when there was absolutely no room left on the bus. He opened the door and the people who are waiting just stood there and give him a funny look because it was physically impossible to fit one more person on there. So he did this for about 10 stops until we finally reach the metro. It took 30 minutes rather than the usual 17. Of course this made me late and by the time I got to Lionel-Groulx metro I had just missed the 211. Despite the fact that this is one of the major bus routes going to the West Island, this bus only seems to run every 20 minutes at that time of day, so I wanted in line until it came at 9:05.
At this point I figured that I would probably be 5 minutes late but everything would still be fine and we would have plenty of time to get there. Wrong of course! We got stuck in traffic three times, then did a detour around Dorval, and then finally, finally made it to the plaza at 9:50AM. Since the defense was at 10 I was certain my co-worker had left by then and was trying to figure out if I should turn around and go back to work (a 2 hour journey) or wait there for 1 1/2 hours with the hopes he would come back after and pick me up. Miraculously, he was just about th exit onto the highway and saw me, pulled a U-turn and picked me up. That was definately the best part of the day. So by the time we made it alllll the way to the MacDonald campus we were 15 minutes late. We had to sneak in and it was unfortunately a bit disruptive but she didn’t seem to be too bothered about it. I was so upset with the entire thing that I think I swore more that day than I have in the past 5 months. There is no relaible and rapid transit out there to the west island and for those of us who lack cars, it may as well not even exist!
Here’s a map to show you where I went: I live in Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace (big yellow one in the middle) and I caught the bus to Pointe Claire (the orange one halfway to the western edge) and then we went to the blue one on the very western edge.
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