MONTREAL — Winter beckons in this busy riverside metropolis of French Canada, but you have to expect the thermometer to dip into the low 40s during the day at this time of year. The cold has helped bring on the fall colors — something lacking during most of our trip — as the trees of Mont Royal, Montreal’s hilltop park, are turning shades of yellow, gold and even an explosion of red.

Montreal is the final stop on our two-week trip into eastern Canada, but before we reached this city of 3.6 million on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence River, we visited Quebec City, the smaller provincial capital to the east, also on the St. Lawrence.

As Holland America Line’s Maasdam pulled into the harbor of Quebec City, I looked up on the bluff facing the harbor, and there was Chateau Frontenac, the massive 19th-century Canadian Pacific hotel, crowning the hill.

Our Elderhostel (now called Exploritas) walking tour took us on a rainy morning through the streets along the waterfront, up the funicular elevator to the top of the hill to the base of the hotel and the center of Old Town Quebec.

The Old Town, the area inside the original walls of Quebec City, emerges as a slice of France transported across the Atlantic. Cobblestone streets are fronted by churches, hotels, numerous restaurants and, yes, even a few of those omnipresent T-shirt shops. The area’s “old town” flavor is intensified by extensive improvements made before 2008, when Quebec City celebrated the 400th anniversary of its founding by Samuel de Chaplain in 1608.

And almost everyone is speaking French, for this capital city of some 492,000 residents is the epicenter of the French-speaking (Francophone) province of Quebec, the province that nearly — but not quite — separated itself from the rest of Canada in the past several decades.

The determination to express the French culture and language is evident in the business signs. Any sign announcing the kind of business has to be in French, with only smaller English subtitles occasionally seen. Any deviations from the rules are pounced upon by what are called “the language police.”

Despite a steady rain, we walked through the streets, stopping to enter historical Catholic and Anglican churches along the way.

We returned to Chateau Frontenac, the towering 650-room hotel named for a flamboyant 17th-century French governor of Quebec, for lunch. The dining room looked over the harbor below just as the rain stopped and the skies cleared for a few moments.

The waiter asked if wanted wine, and we ordered a glass of red. When the waiter brought the bottle, it wasn’t wine from the Bordeaux or Burgundy wine regions of France, as might be expected. The label read “Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi.” From Lodi with love.

After lunch, we walked out on the hotel veranda and looked to the west, where the Quebec Citadel — a working French army base — is located atop the hill called the “Plains of Abraham.” It was here, in 1759, that the British, after a long siege, finally defeated the French to end what we Americans call the French and Indian War, turning what had been known as “New France” into a part of British Canada.

That defeat, and the feelings of many French-speaking Canadians that they have been viewed and treated as second-class citizens in a mostly English-speaking (Anglophone) country, is still played out in the Quebec separatist movement.

The last time the province voted on establishing a separate country with only loose ties with the rest of Canada — in 1995 — the vote was 51-to-49 percent to remain in Canada. That razor-thin margin is the thread holding Canada together.

The common belief is that a third of French-speaking Quebec Province citizens are hardcore separatists and a third oppose it. That leaves another third who could swing either way if another vote is taken, as expected.

The day after our visit to Quebec City, the Maasdam made its final port, Montreal, and you gain a sense that while most residents speak French, the separatist movement might not be quite as strong here in a center of commerce, industry and education.

Our hotel is in the Old Town section of Montreal, which, unlike the original section of Quebec City, is a work in progress. A number of warehouses along the waterfront have been demolished to provide a landscaped promenade along the St. Lawrence, but many buildings lining the promenade remain undeveloped.

A street just north of the waterfront, though — Rue St. Paul — is lined with boutique hotels, restaurants, art galleries (and, yes, T-shirt shops) to form a center for restoration now under way.

Walking along Rue St. Paul near our hotel, we detoured around workmen placing cobblestones in the intersection. At night, the street was filled with Canadian and foreign tourists, and the restaurants appeared busy, indeed.

Nearby, the Montreal Museum of Archeology and History is on the site of the founding of the city in 1642. Under the museum, we walked through the uncovered foundations of the original buildings along with historical presentations. Very well done.

Several blocks north of the waterfront, the business and government center includes a mix of highly decorative 19th-century multistory buildings and striking modern structures. The towers of the Notre Dame Basilica rise above the area not far from Montreal’s World Trade Center and Montreal Convention Centre.

A bus trip through the city took us atop Mont Royal, the rambling hilltop park at the center of the island formed by the St. Lawrence and several tributaries. We looked down on the stadium constructed for the 1976 Summer Olympic Games.

After the Elderhostel tour ended, we stayed two more days in Montreal to explore the city on our own. We took the Metro subway, completed in 1966, north to Rue Sherbrooke — transferring once in a clean, spacious station — to reach our goal.

We surfaced near McGill University, Canada’s most prestigious center of higher learning. Classes are still taught in English, providing a tie for Montreal to the English language and to the rest of Canada. Classes at the University of Montreal, atop Mont Royal, are in French.

On Rue Sherbrooke, we visited the McCord Museum, which features the history of Canada, and also the Musée des Beaux-Arts, a fine-arts museum with a unique display of paintings and artifacts of Emperor Napoleon of France. The display was donated by a Montreal collector. It was indeed strange to gaze upon the famous black hat that Napoleon wore when he reached Moscow in his ill-fated Russian campaign.

Rue Sherbrooke is a center of high-fashion stores, high-end hotels and high-priced restaurants. Farther south toward the original part of Montreal, a parallel street, Rue St. Catherine, is home to popular culture and more moderately priced shopping. The street was crowded with shoppers one afternoon when the sun came out over Canada’s three-day Thanksgiving weekend.

Returning toward Old Town on the Metro, we stopped to explore the many underground passageways — many of which connect subway stations — containing a wide variety of stores, restaurants and entrances to street-level businesses. Montreal has the largest underground network in the world — 18 miles — and it is especially busy during the cold winter months.

Another unique feature of Montreal, evident in all parts of the city, are the “Bixi” bicycle stands. A dozen specially Montreal-designed bicycles are parked in each of the stands, available for rent. In the first phase of deployment, there are 3,000 bikes at 300 stations.

Montreal residents need only to insert a credit card to begin the process. A $250 deposit is recorded, and rental prices begin at $5 for the first half-hour, with less expensive increments up to 90 minutes and $6 for additional half-hours. Bikes can be returned to any Bixi location, at which point the deposit is cleared.

The system, installed earlier this year, works because of the deposit, the unique design of the bikes that easily identifies them and the honesty of Montreal’s citizens. A similar setup is being considered in U.S. cities. Boston will be first.

I mentioned the prices of Bixi rentals in dollars. After lagging behind the value of the U.S. dollar for most of recent history, the Canadian dollar has gained 25 percent in value compared with the U.S. dollar in the past year or so and nears parity.

As we neared the end of our stay, news accounts reported that the Canadian dollar, pegged near 97 cents to the U.S. dollar, was expected to reach full parity — and more — in the next few weeks. Welcome to the reality of Americans visiting foreign lands. The value of visiting the unique corner of North America that is eastern Canada, though, was well worth every sagging U.S. dollar spent.

• Sam Matthews, Tracy Press publisher emeritus, is home from Canada. He can be reached at 830-4234 or by e-mail at shm@tracypress.com. >/i>