And now, after Vancouver and Toronto, I completed my trio of Canada’s largest airports by visiting Montreal-Dorval-Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau. After the whole Mirabel fiasco, where Montreal invested umpty-ump dollars to build a state of the art airport in the middle of nowhere with no transport links and which is now used only by cargo and charters, I was expecting Dorval to be pretty sucky, but in fact it was a perfectly decent modern airport.

It’s always a pleasant surprise to expect a crummy B767 and get an only slightly scuffed A330 instead. Better yet, I’d been granted an aisle bulkhead seat, so I had decent legroom and could even try to stretch my legs out into the aisle (if at the risk of getting run over by carts).

AC is scrupulously bilingual, but this flight is (unsurprisingly) the first one where French goes ahead of English, and even the crew seemed to assume right off the bat that I’m francophone — which has yet to happen to me in Montreal.

I’m positive the “beef” entree I opted for today, a vaguely Chinese sorta-stirfry with noodles, was the same as the one I didn’t take on the NAS-YYZ flight…