L’automne 2024: Day 2: Quebec City (again)
For today’s morning walk I ventured over to one of the boulangeries for some croissant and a baguette. Two croissant, two choclatine and two almandine. Mission accomplished! Well, not the mission of a significant walk. I dropped off the necessities for Mrs Milddogs to enjoy with her coffee and to share with our neighbours and then continued walking around the harbour area to get some more distance in.
We lazed around a bit in the morning drinking cafe, eating croissant and smoking our Gitanes (in 8″ cigarette holders, of course) while we soaked in the culture of our parking lot camping area and waited for the light rains to pass. Parts of the previous statement are true. Mon beret est bleu et blanc.
We bought an app that was a self guided walking tour of the old city. Then we headed off. We walked around leisurely taking in the city while following the route of the tour mostly. We took some pictures.
We walked about 7km with ~100m of elevation gain. It was lovely.
Mid walk we stopped at an Irish Pub which had Coors Light on tap! Mission completed!
For lunch, at the Irish Pub, three of us had Philly Cheesesteaks and one of us had tacos (me). It’s important to start new Irish traditions!
Post lunch we went slightly back up hill to the donut store and then walked over to another Patisserie to sample their goodness. Can never have enough croissant based stuff. On the way we passed a group of people with Buffalo Bills shirts on. It takes all kinds! I could not resist yelling out “Go Dolphins Go”. Fortunately they were Bills fans and did not have the passion to rebut my challenge. The patisserie was nice, small and had limited choice. Pain-o-chocolate and some of their magic little puffy things were added to our collection. Now laden with surplus lunch food, croissants and other stuff we headed back down hill to our harbour home.
About that App. I am going to try and get a refund. Why? Well, it was billed as a walking tour but was actually a driving tour. That made a difference. It killed my phone battery from 95% to 25% in half an hour. There were surprising few mentions of some of the obviously historic buildings. The one we used in Salem, MA was far better content. Note that we only covered about half of the points given the lack of battery.
The bike race tomorrow seems to be a big event. I met some neighbour campers here in our parking lot while I showed them how to pay. They informed me we might not actually be able to leave here tomorrow because of the bike race. Well, that would be interesting. We have formulated a plan to try and get out. If not, we walk up and watch the race and figure out what to do when we can leave. In theory, we could have researched this, but hey, this might be an opportunity. As long as that opportunity doesn’t result in us overfilling our holding tanks, all is good!
There were plenty of helicopters flying around today, likely practicing for race coverage.
Tomorrow the goal is the get to Tadoussac. There are some beautiful stops along the way. Our travelling companions (not a child of 9 years old) have been to Tadoussac by sailboat (ask them about that – maybe they need another blog, ourviewfromthewater.blog?) but not overland. Come back tomorrow to see what we actually end up doing.
It smells like croissants in the van. It’s wonderful!
Take care out there!
