Joe asked me in May whether I wanted to do another road trip later that summer to Quebec City, and I said ok so he booked a room at a pretty good rate (considering it wasn’t Pricelined) at the new Four Points in Quebec. Fast forward a couple of months to Civic holiday and off we went.
I have a couple of floaters over the summer, which extended my long weekends to four days, so we were able to leave Friday morning. We stopped in Belleville for lunch at Swiss Chalet, along with a couple of rest stops and made it to the hotel by 9PM. Google Maps had clocked it in at almost 9 hours, which would have been doable; except we got to Montreal at 5PM and got stuck in traffic. We drove through a storm system between Montreal and Québec, which cooled down the temperature a lot. But the storm was following us so we decided to have a late dinner at the hotel and then turn in for the night.
The next day, we headed into the city bright and early. By 9PM we were finishing up our breakfast in the terrace of Auberge Louis-Hébert on the Grande Allée. We wandered around the Haute-Ville (Upper Town) for awhile, but the sun was bright and it was too hot. Randomly, we saw not one, but two Christmas stores so we spent some time in them. The best part of that was their Christmas weather (i.e., air condition).
Although I shouldn’t have been complaining about the weather. After we booked the hotel, we found out that we were going during the New France Festival. Walking around Haute-Ville, we didn’t see a lot of festival sites, but we did see a lot of people celebrating by dressing up in full colonial wear (i.e., pirates, military, farmers). It must have been brutal for them because they didn’t have the global warming problem 400 years ago. Eventually after lunch we made it down to Basse-Ville and saw the actual festival sites as well as the hordes of people walking around the cobblestone roads.
Around late afternoon, we drove out of the city and headed over to Montmonrency Falls. We had planned to walk around the falls area, and then to stay late for the Loto-Québec International Fireworks Competition. However, when we got there, we realized that they pretty much converted the park to show the fireworks, so we weren’t able to walk around and up close to the falls. That was also bad news, because it left us with about 4 hours to kill between arriving and the start of the fireworks at 9:30. Secondly, because we were tourists and unprepared, we didn’t bring any seating with us. Fortunately, because we were so early; we were able to score a picnic bench which we guarded by playing Soduku and, well that was pretty much it. I had conveniently left my playing cards and book in the hotel. By the time 9:30 rolled around, we were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of those fold-up camp chairs (so useful wow!).
The fireworks show itself was pretty good, much better than the “free” shows you see to celebrate Canada Day or other events. It lasted about half an hour and was accompanied by music. The music was all Portuguese (I assume) because the Portuguese delegation performed that night. The setup of the speakers were pretty annoying, because they were at different ends of the park yet loud enough to hear both, there was a small perceptible lag between the close speaker and the farther one.
Afterwards, we sat around in the parking lot for an hour, waiting to leave; again due to our tourist ways (a lot of people took shuttle buses) and being early birds (we got a great parking spot near the entrance).
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