Five Nights At Froggys

We’re in Quebec City now, staying here:

Chateau de Frontenac is an iconic and famous hotel that has stood on the bluff overlooking the St Lawrence river for 130 years. I stayed here with Jim many years ago, but the hotel was being heavily renovated at that time, and that work is now long complete. Needless to say, it’s far too fancy for a lout like me!

That’s our room view, and you’re seeing a performance area where professional acrobats give shows all day long (literally until 11pm last night). I’m sure we’ll watch one tomorrow.

After arriving we explored the ‘old city’ immediately adjacent to the hotel, buying souvenirs and eating well. The best purchase: Kristin bought two original paintings. They’re packed up well now, but I’ll show them off in a future post.

That’s the promenade outside the hotel, and if you look to the right from this promenade you overlook the ‘lower city’ and the river. As part of summer festivities there were fireworks launched from a barge in the river, and we joined thousands of others on the promenade to watch.

It was a long and spectacular show, and I loved how the booms echoed from each bank of the river.

Tomorrow we’ll go down and explore the ‘lower city’, and no doubt more shopping and eating will follow 🙂

Frog Eat Frog

That picture shows Lac Sacacomie, and was taken from the terrace of our hotel. You can see the hotel itself in this next photo, if you look closely along the tree line above the lake:

We’re ‘up north’, probably the second most northern place we’ve ever been (Orkney is Scotland was our northernmost). We came up here as a rest between Montreal and Quebec City, and to give us a chance to see the Northern Lights. The drive to the hotel was through rural countryside until we hit the pine forests, at which point we reached some unpaved roads and signs warning of moose!

The hotel is a ‘spa’ hotel, and has a hot spring and sauna, as well as a wide range of activities, many of which are free for guests. It’s a massive log cabin building filled with stuffed animals including a moose, otter, caribou and this porcupine. Rooms are rustic, wood paneled, and short on luxuries like air-conditioning or even a TV (but as is obvious from me blogging, they do have wifi). It’s the sort of place you’d visit for a few days just to do nothing but relax by a beautiful lake and eat good food.

When we arrived we went for a hike along one of the many trails, which was more an overgrown road that what you may expect. This is because in winter the trails are used for snowmobiling or dogsledding, both of which are offered by the hotel. We didn’t see any large wildlife, but we saw a few birds and 35 (yes we counted) frogs! At one point we heard what sounded like growling and was probably a distant engine, but in the middle of the otherwise quiet woods it was momentarily disconcerting.

The above is the path down to the lake from the hotel, which is a fair descent. The path runs along a steep mountainside and has 129 steps, all of which were agony on the way back. The beach is nice, and there are ample free kayaks and canoes for guests to use on the glass-calm lake, as well as motorboats to rent if you want to go to the islands. Somehow you can even rent a seaplane for a sightseeing flight, and we saw it flying over yesterday.

There’s a… mystery about this place. The building seems simultaneously very old and very new, and the lack of signage is unusual to travelers used to hotels in places like Japan. For example we’ve explored the building and still don’t know where the spa is! Also no vending is strange, especially when rooms have no fridge and shops are a significant drive away. What is a guest to do if they need a drink after the bar closes? Some of this eeriness is likely due to the fact that all signage is in French and most of the staff don’t speak English, but it also feels as if some of the hotel policies are different from what we’re used to.

And last night when we went out to see the aurora there were people just standing in the hall and others sitting in a dark common room. Kristin said we may have inadvertently stayed in a ‘vampire hotel’ and perhaps she’s right!

As for the Northern Lights…

That’s what we saw. The terrace of the hotel afforded uninterrupted night sky viewing, and the haze from earlier in the day had burned off so we could see stars, but only stars. Kristin had downloaded an app to help us, and it reported our chance of seeing aurora at 0% unless we drove much further north (to Greenland). Ironically the lights have recently been viewable in Albany. Oh well, a goal that will survive for another day 🙂

We skipped dinner – which is to say that five ramen debacle detailed in the last entry was dinner – so it was good that the buffet breakfast was quite magnificent. It’s time to leave this strange hotel now and head back to civilization. We’ll never return here, but I think the trip was worth it just this once 🙂

Ramen 28: Froggy Style

There’s a lot to be said about our current hotel but it can wait until tomorrow since now is surely the best time for five new chicken ramen reviews. This time I’ll feature Canadian products, purchased this very day in a supermarket we encountered en route.

Chicken Flavour Kimchi Ramen (380 Calories, 16g fat, 1030 mg sodium)

Because the packaging of this large bowl ramen didn’t specifically state it, I foolishly didn’t realize this would be spicy when I purchased it. The brilliant red powder smelled stronger than it looked, and is it any surprised that the taste – like burned tomato – was so repellent to my refined palate that it almost made me gag. A loathsome product, and deserving of a 0/10 grade.

Mr Noodles Chicken Ramen Bowl (510 Calories, 22g fat, 2160 mg sodium)

This is one of the largest instant noodle products I’ve ever seen, and the nutritional value is equally ‘impressive’ (98% of your daily sodium in this one product). It seemed average before cooked, and the dehydrated veggies actually looked good. But then I prepared and tasted it, and was disappointed to learn it’s another in a long line of so-called chicken flavoured products that tastes more like cut grass. The noodles looked almost beautiful as they flushed down the loo, but it still earned a score of 0/10.

Mr Noodles Chicken Ramen (310 Calories, 13g fat, 1250 mg sodium)

This is the small cup version of the above, and while common sense may suggest it would be identical there have been cases in the past when small and large bowls by the same company have been different. Not this time: it’s another ‘cut grass’ ramen and it took much longer to prepare it than it took to flush it. An easy 0/10.

Mr Noodles Chicken Ramen (190 Calories, 7g fat, 600 mg sodium)

Next came the brick version of the same product. As someone who has now sampled 75 (!) chicken ramen products I will say that bricks are often better than cups, but my absolute favourites are still cups. This brick…? Down the loo it went, and more for absolute lack of any taste than because I found it objectionable. Don’t bother with this 0/10 product.

Selection Chicken Flavoured Instant Noodles (310 Calories, 14g fat, 810 mg sodium)

And thus we arrive at the last, and to answer your question yes, all five of these were tasted just now in our hotel room. The previous four were so awful I rested all my hopes on this one, if only because I was hungry. The veggies looked good and the noodles were denser and more promising than the weedy ones I’d already tasted. As I raised the fork to my mouth my mind reflected on the fact that the toilet had eaten more ramen than me this day. Seconds later, as I flushed this store brand product to God knows where, I sighed and recorded in the mysterious ledger of ramen scores the fifth 0/10 of this fated evening.