Days 11 & 12: Quebec City

We arrived after dark last night, so today got our first look at the old town of Quebec City. Our first order of business was brunch at Boulay. The food and our server were really great. As these road trips go, this place was recommended by a woman we randomly spoke with while on an evening stroll on the pier in St. Andrews the night before. Those little conversations often send us off in new directions.

Old town Quebec was a great place to visit and I would come back. My anticipation was that it would feel like going to Europe, without having to fly all night to get there. That expectation pretty much turned out to be true. And this was made so especially by French being the local language.

The annual, giant, musical festival was happening while we were here. Festival d'été de Québec is huge and brings in many musical acts, famous and not. This might have added to the visitors here, but it wasn’t an issue for us.

A shopkeeper sweeping her step in old town.

A word about poutine. This is a favorite dish of Canada, and it sounded terrible to me. The recipe is basically a plate of French fries, some cheese curds on top followed by brown gravy. There are of course many variations. We decided to poll random people here. The question: “Do you like poutine??”, was asked to about 10 people, servers, clerks in stores and our hotel. Except for one guy, everyone actually glowed when they answered “YES!!!”. They loved it. Many said it was good for late night hangover prevention. So that presented a quandary. I realized that I probably would have to try poutine. It was just a matter of when. That time came where there was duck confit poutine on a menu. I like duck a lot, so I went for it. As seen in the photo. It wasn’t too bad. I loved the way the cheese curds melted, but I wasn’t wild about the brown gravy. Of course, thin crispy French fries are hard to beat.

Public art.

Everything was French here. Little English text. Most people we spoke with did speak English, at least enough. And no one was ugly about having to speak English (the people here were great). On our recent trip to Spain and Portugal, overall I encountered better English by the locals there than I did here. And you see poutine make a strange appearance again here.

The rain came on the second day here. So we got in the car and made the short drive to Montmorency Falls, a large waterfall east of town. It was quite a setup, with a gondola taking you from the lower area up to the crest of the falls. There you could walk across on a suspension bridge over the falls or do a zip line across.

I changed to black & white in the spirit of the rainy, cloudy day. This was taken through the wet gondola window.

View from the top of the falls. Due to the heavy and continued rains in the area, the falls were flowing much heavier than normal.

Zipliner gong across the falls.

This woman was looking trance like over the edge of the suspension bridge to the roaring falls, not too far below her feet.

Rain tool. We had a great meal in this Italian restaurant. We ate at the bar, met one of the regulars and the owner too.

More public art, in the rain, the night before we left Quebec City.