Quebec

Hi everyone, sorry this has been a long time coming. As I mentioned, we have been in and out of internet contact for the past couple of weeks, and it takes quite a long time to load all of the photos up here.

So, we arrived in Quebec City and started the morning with breakfast with our friends Pat and Clo. They both speak French as their first language, but speak English reasonably well. (By the end of the week, we had picked up a few French words and phrases)
We spent the first afternoon walking around the old City. It is so incredibly beautiful, with amazing architechure. The fortified walls are still around the city and there is a castle and Citadel where they would have fought from, had they been invaded. We finished the afternoon with a drink in a bar that had over 200 types of beer, then went back to Pat and Clo’s 3rd floor apartment, where Jahan and I cooked dinner.

The next day we started late, after Pat and Clo were dealing with the papers for the house they had just purchased. We went to have a look at the house, which is in a smaller town just out of Quebec City at the bottom of the mountains and near a large lake. It’s a really pretty area and they have a forest of Maple trees behind their house. Their neighbour has a ‘sugar shack’ where he makes syrup from the maple trees. All the local children help him and in return he gives them maple syrup to take home.
We then went to Pat’s ‘shack’ which he recently bought with his Brother and Father. He has a big piece of land with forest on it and owns part of the lake in front of it.
We finished the night with dinner at a local restaurant, which is also a micro brewery. We had fun trying to order from the all French menu…and later found out that we could have asked for an English one!

We woke up to rain the next day, but headed for a small town called Charlevoix, about 2 ½ hours from Quebec City. We had planned to do a hike today but due to the weather we decided to check into the log cabin we were staying in, light a fire and play cards instead.

The following day we hiked up the ‘Acropolis’. It was incredibly tiring, and really steep, but we got there. The hike is the most difficult in the park, climbing over 800 metres in 4.5 km. The view from the top was amazing. The valley below was home to a glacier, it’s really interesting because glaciers usually form the valley they are in, but because the rock is so hard, the glacier actually turned a 90 degree angle.
We drove back to Quebec City and had dinner at a steak house close to their apartment.

In our last full day with Pat and Clo we began with an amazing breakfast of croissants, waffles and fruit. We did some more sight seeing at a park, the railway station, and their waterfall. We then went to a sushi restaurant.. this menu was half French, half Japanese, so between Jahan and our friends we managed to figure it all out.

Quebec City was really beautiful, it is like being lost somewhere in the middle of Europe. The trees are really pretty and the people, (although they mostly speak French) are really friendly. We had a tearful goodbye at the airport, but have decided we will meet them halfway in between NZ and Canada next time.

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