Day19 Quebec (Wed 17th)

We leave our bags outside the hotel room door for an early pickup of 6:00am and head off to breaky to board the bus by 6:45am. We’re doing about 600km today and will end up in Quebec City, Quebec. We stop several times along the way for those that need to to go to the loo and for a leg stretch. The country side is great, grean trees and bright green grass, a land of lakes, and ski slopes for the winter where the trees have been cleared and the rolling hills look like carpet greens. Some of the best ski resorts are just off the highway apparently where the idle rich come to play for the winter, its all relative.

As we near the border between the US and Canada we get a chance to do some duty free shopping, and Lay, our guide, gives us instructions on what to get ready, passports is all and how to answer the common questions, “Where are you going?”, “What are you doing in Canada?”. I get asked, “Have you ever been arrested?”, “Have you got any weapons?”. All very uneventful but the whole bus watches as the two Knight pairs, with the same first and last names, go through together but the guards don’t even notice which indicates their interest level I think.
We head off down the highway merrily on our way to Quebec City, a couple of hours away on the four lane freeway that turns bumpy every now and then as the winters knock around the bitumen surface. As we enter the outer city it starts to rain but clears after half an hour. Its peak hour traffic so its slow going as we near the Hilton in the city centre and just a few short escalator rides to the old inner city wall build by the English in the 1600s in case the French wanted to try and take back the city and from which they defeated the Americans twice and on the plains of Abraham (after Lincon) when they thought they’d like to add Quebec to the United States way back then.

The idea is to check in and come back to the bus in 45min as we have arrived 20min late and head out to dinner. Three choices of restaurants and there ends up being 6 in our group at a French seafood nice place, with great big 2 foot beams holding up the floors above, from ages ago. Its Quebec’s 400th anniversary this year, celebrating from 1608’s discovery.
A pleasant meal with nice conversation and we walk back through the restored old buildings and after asking several times we together find the Venhicular, a cable car contraption for getting us up the steep cliffs from the water front district to the high city, pass the parliament house and eventually back to our hotel. Our room has a great view out over the city, deep water harbour (that isn’t salt until out after the nearby island because of the run out of the river) and sunrise the morning after next.