Cycling around the west Island Part 2

One of the stranger facts about the West Island is that there are villages embedded in the fabric of the big city suburbs. Before the suburbs took over there was a series of small villages along the shore of the Saint Lawrence River. With the growth of the urban landscape these villages found themselves in the middle of the housing developments. The first time you are biking or driving along and suddenly you are in the the middle of a typical small village, it is a very strange feeling. It is one of the better kept secrets of our part of the island.
At the complete end of the island is the town of Ste-Anne de Bellevue. This town has been around since the 18th century and has a canal that connects Lac St-Louis, Lac des Deux Montagnes and the Ottawa river. This canal is a National Historic site and was originally built in the 1840's. There has been a canal with locks here since 1816, bypassing the rapids between the western end of the island and Île Perot.

This is the canal facing toward Lac St-Louis

Main Street

The Town Hall (in French l'Hôtel de Ville is not a place to sleep. ;o)

Despite having been gussied up, this is the original general store of the village. G Daoust & Cie has been a fixture of Ste-Anne for more than 100 years. It still has its creaking wooden floors and an old fashioned method of paying. There is a sort of pulley system that goes all around the store. The clerk takes your money, puts it in a small metal box and hooks it to line which is whirling around the pulley system. The money and bill go to a central office where they make up your final bill and then send it back to you with your change. The owners even bought up several old systems when other places closed so they would have spare parts to keep their system going.

Ste-Anne is also the home of John Abbott college and the Macdonald Campus of McGill University. It is a beautiful campus made up of red brick buildings, mature trees and large fields of grass. My daughter got her degree in microbiology there. Macdonald Campus is the agricultural portion of McGill and they even have a complete working farm. John Abbott is a CEGEP and rents a part of the campus from McGill. The whole campus is quite nice and reminds me of the universities near Boston.

We are now riding along Lakeshore road, which as you can see runs along the shore of Lac St-Louis. As we get to Baie d'Urfé, a rich suburb we can see one of the many marinas.

This is the town hall

and this is a picture taken at night of the boats on the lake near the town hall.

As we ride along Lakeshore Road, we will finally come to Pointe-Claire Village.

The town of Pointe-Claire has a windmill on its coat of arms and here is the reason. The windmill in on a point of land jutting out in the lake near the church. The windmill originally belonged to the church.

As you can see there is a small town atmosphere but yet we are in the middle of the suburbs. So though the West Island is known as a bedroom suburb, in reality there are many hidden facets that most people don't know about. In the next blog I'll show you some of the hidden gems, for there are still many of the old farm houses that have survived and can be found throughout the more modern suburban housing.