Monteregie is the region of Quebec roughly sandwiched between Montreal and the New York state border. It's mostly a huge fertile plain with a line of independent rocky hills dotted across it. We spent a couple days here largely for genealogical reasons but there are several interesting attractions. This is the church of St Marguerite de Blairfindie in the outskirts of St Jean sur Richlieu. Formerly, this was the town of L'Acadie Saint-Jean which was a destination for the Acadian people who were forced out of Atlantic Canada. As you can see, it's very picturesque in Autumn.

A short distance north is the pretty town of Chambly spread out on the shores of a lake. Fort Chambly is located here, it's a small historical site run by Parks Canada. There's not a whole lot to see here but it's a scenic place to wander around.

A little further north from Chambly is one of the Monteregian hills that the area is named after. Mont Saint Hilaire is run by McGill University under the name of the Gault Nature Reserve. About half the mountain is open to hiking with an extensive network of trails. The other half is closed to visitors and used as a research forest. This is a beautiful place to hike.

There are at least four different summits you can reach by trail, all of which potentially have a view of Montreal in good weather (we put those pictures on the following Montreal page). This is the summit called Pain de Sucre which has a far better view than Burned Hill does. From here you can also see the Green Mountains in Vermont and the Adirondacks in New York. The towns immediately below are Mont-Saint-Hilaire and McMasterville.

We also visited the Granby Zoo, probably the major tourist attraction in the Monteregie region. It's a very large zoo. We'd recommend going on a warmer day than we ended up there on, but oh well. This is the lorikeet feeding area which was quite popular with the kids.