Robot Claw

People seem to sleep late here in Old City Quebec since even the cafes don’t open for breakfast! We had a bit of a late start as well, before heading down to the ‘lower city’ to see what was down there.

Quebec City has a walled section, which is now full of hotels and shops and tourists. Directly below the high ramparts on the river side is another concentration of shops and restaurants – similar to those above – catering to tourists as well. We wandered around like people tired after an active week and purchased nougat and Tintin postcards!

There’s a few ways up/down between the upper and lower cities, but the most direct walking route is a staircase called the ‘breakneck steps’. When it came time to return to the promenade, we chose the funicular 🙂

There’s a fort (Le Citadelle) not far from the hotel, and Jim and I visited it when we were here years ago. We weren’t going to go this time but I learned they had a temporary exhibit on tabletop war gaming so in the afternoon I went and had a look. The exhibit was small but had some nice artifacts, although I would have preferred more info about each.

Many board games were showcased, including the above one from over 60 years ago. It brought back memories of Bernard and I trying to play a similar insanely complicated wargame (Blitzkreig) that we someone obtained as kids. I’m sure we ignored most of the rules 🙂

After the wargame exhibit I got sucked into their wider museum and spent an hour or so reading all about the Canadian contributions to the world wars and afterwards. I liked the above photo showing the allied leaders during WW2. It was taken very close to the Citadel, and shows our hotel in the background.

Today our Canadian excursion comes to an end! As with any vacation this means the return to ‘normal’ life, but we’ve got one more night in a hotel before we see our kitties again…

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 🙂

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 🙂

We were going to climb Mount Royal today (the mountain from which the city is named) but it was hot and we decided the effort may have been a bit much after the last two days so we returned to the Olympic park to visit the Insectarium, which we overlooked yesterday.

I visited this place with Jim when I was here 11 years ago, but the place has changed quite a bit. It’s a small museum/zoo dedicated to insects with only a few displays, but the quality of what they have is very high. After a walk through a simulation of an anthill, you enter a large dimly-lit circular room with dozens of displays of mounted insects, and it was mesmerizing.

The top row of displays were sorted by colour, from white to brown through the entire rainbow, and the bottom was sorted by category (size, wings, long legs, camouflage etc). It was fascinating seeing the incredible variety, and there must have been thousands of different insects in total. Our favorites were the metallic bugs and iridescent butterflies, which in some cases looked like they were fashioned of precious metals or gems!

As beautiful as the insects in this room were, the fact remains they were all dead. This made the next section – a massive butterfly ‘house’ – all the more impressive.

This was a large space with hundreds (thousands?) of butterflies. Everywhere you looked there were butterflies flying, sitting on a leaf or eating from a fruit buffet. There were dozens of species and sizes, and they even had pupae on display since they breed some of the butterflies on location. On average they live for only a month, and they track the lifespans by keeping track of individual specimens via stickers attached to their wings (bottom right in above pic).

While the Insectarium was small and (possibly) overpriced, I’d say it was worth it for the butterflies alone, especially if you’re a fan.

In the afternoon we explored some more of the Underground City (the above was part of a large fresco we found in a dead-end corridor), did some more shopping and ate some delicious food. And yes, that includes poutine, although you can guess which of us declined to sample that famous Canadian speciality!