a secret garden

Yesterday was another beautifully sunny day. As it's getting colder and picnic days are coming to an end, I decided to close our season and serve one last one for my beloved. We normally tend to go to a park close by, called Parc Lafontaine along with a lot of other humans, dogs and squirrels. 
This time I decided to make it more intimate and romantic and take my beloved over the bridge to the Island of Sainte-Hélène. The walk there is less romantic thanks to cars and moody people on bikes but the view is spectacular.

On the island you can see a brick tower and just below it, is our romantic spot. 

The tower, called tour de Lévis, is a water tower built in 1936. Unfortunately nothing more romantic than that but it apparently has a breathtaking view of the city and its surroundings if you are lucky enough to get access to the inside and walk up the 157 steps. We have not been that lucky yet.

Our picnic spot we got to share with a duck and two squirrels and thankfully no moody humans. It's such a wonderfully quiet place, at least this time a year. It feels somewhat abandoned and therefore a bit secretive.

We sat down close to the pond that I assume is a man built one. We put on some nice Dominican music, Fernando Villalona, to be more precise. I'm in a period of being absolutely crazy about his more romantically sad boleros and cha-cha-chá rhythms.  For a woman in the fashion industry, a bolero is a piece of clothing or then the classical music piece of Ravel. I'm however expanding my horizons and so I learned that bolero is as well a slow tempo music with roots in both Spain and Cuba. By listening to Fernando Villalona one gets to enjoy the Cuban version spiced up in a Dominican way. 

We got to enjoy the company of the duck the entire time. Apparently it's not only us who enjoys the more quiet spots of Montreal, because this duck was completely alone with no friends or family in sight but none the less in a very descretly social mood. 

 When the sky slowly started to turn off its light in our secret garden, we packed our bags, said goodbye to the duck and walked back up to the Jacques Cartier bridge. The view was just as spectacular after sunset but the humans unfortunately not any less moody.