20020517

May 17, 2002

Day 8

Start: Camping Transit, St Joseph-de-la-Pointe-Levy, QU
End: 
Miles: 0

It was mostly cloudy when we got up, but at least it wasn’t raining. There was a lot of standing water in the campground. It was 39f in the morning and 52f in the afternoon.

It turns out this weekend is a long weekend, with a Monday holiday. The rest of Canada celebrates it as “Victoria Day” after Queen Victoria, queen at the founding of Canada. Quebec, however, celebrates it as the “birthday of a bunch of old guys” according to our campground hostess. She’s a total hoot – always joking – but very willing to help we Anglophones (English-speaking outlanders).

We took the truck to the Levis waterfront, parked it for the day ($3CDN, about $1.80US), and took the ferry ($2CDN each) across the river to Old Quebec. We walked up from the waterfront through the lower city to Jolliett’s house, where the funicular (a 45-degree sloped glassed-in elevator) takes one up to the old walled city of Quebec. This is the only walled city in America north of Mexico. 

We had missed the morning tours, so we entered the Tourisme Informatique to get ideas. We came out with a self-guided tour and map for a two-hour, inside the walled city hike. 

The wind picked up and wind chill temperatures were right down there. If you could find a spot out of the wind, it was perfectly comfortable. The tour was interesting. Dolores found two Catholic churches she wanted to look into, so we did. The Chateau Frontenac is huge! We never even found the lobby, although we did find all the boutique shops.

We took some pictures from the Terrasse (terrace) along the top of the wall on the river side, of the Levis side, and of the Chateau, that should come out well.

This being May, it’s school class trip days. There were hundreds of teenagers, more or less under control, in groups going from place to place.

Lunch was taken at “Aux Anciens Canadiens”, a comfy, warm, small place near the Chateau. The prix fixe lunch consisted of a glass of wine, bread, a cup of vegetable soup, a selection of entrée, a selection of dessert, and coffee for $13.50CDN. As our campground hostess said, “you had a great lunch for seven or eight dollars”. The wine was decent, the bread was very nice, and the soup was pureed and went down very nicely. My entrée was a meatball ragout, about four large meatballs and a small potato in meat gravy, and a little dish of pickled beets. Dolores had Quebec Pie, ground pork in pastry, with potato, turnips, snow peas, and fruit compote. We both chose strawberry sorbet for dessert and took the coffee (strong, black, we both added sugar).

Then we decided we had done enough of the official tour, and took off on our own. We walked a little more, looked in some shops, dropped back down the funicular to the lower city, and shopped around some more. 

I got chilled in doing this, so we decided to take it easy on ourselves. We fueled up for tomorrow’s trip and returned to the campground. We called ahead to check on availability of sites tomorrow, and received the reply that there are lots of spaces available. 

Figuring that we are going to read or watch TV (there are two non-French channels) and rest, D bought a Haagen-Daaz snack and I took a bottle of red wine from the campground store.

We’ve seen enough of Quebec City to tell that it would be nice to return, but we’ve seen the high points and dined well. If we don’t get back here, we have that.