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This morning’s itinerary is a bus trip out to Montmorency Falls which we read tumble into the St Lawrence River about 10 kms downstream of Quebec City. The bus stops right outside the door of our hotel, but that’s about where the convenience ends. The driver doesn’t accept credit cards or give change, which seems to us like a great way of extracting large quantities of cash from unsuspecting tourists. The seats aren’t padded, and if there are any shock absorbers on this vehicle they passed their use by date several decades ago. Issy had one of her shakes for breakfast - a powder that she spent a long time mixing with water. She could have saved herself a lot of effort is she’d just eaten the powder and let the bus do the rest of the work. The other slightly off-putting thing about our bus is that the emergency exit is a small hatch in the ceiling. If this is the only way out after the bus drives off the road into the river, I wouldn’t like the chances of any passengers who’d being over-doing the doughnuts.
We get a look at the suburbs of Quebec for the first
time in daylight. The houses look cute. Most of them have steeply pitched rooves, presumably so that the snow slides off easily in winter. The rooves of some of them are however much flatter which leaves us wondering how the residents cope when there’s several metres of powder parked above their heads for months on end in the “cooler” season. Do these owners spend most of the winter camped on the roof shovelling snow, or do they perhaps just wait for the inevitable cave in and rebuild. The latter option sounds a bit cold and inconvenient. I think I might be missing something here. The other thing that we really notice is that virtually none of the houses have fences around them. I wonder what you do if you happen to have a dog, or even more worryingly if you’ve got the sort of crazy unhinged neighbour that we’ve got living on one side of us back home.
The Falls are crazy spectacular. They’re on the Montmorency River where it flows over a cliff just upstream of its confluence with the St Lawrence River. They’re apparently 89 metres high, which makes them a full 30 metres higher than Niagara
Falls, if maybe not quite as wide. There’s a suspension bridge right across the top, with stunning views of the Falls, back to Quebec City, and across the St Lawrence to the adjacent Ile d’Orleans. We catch a cable car down to the base, which then leaves us having to climb the 487 steps up the wooden staircase set into the rock face on the other side to complete the loop. That’s a lot of steps. Something tells me it might have been better to take the steps down and the cable car up …. but at least now we’ll know for next time… It looks like you can zipline right across the top of the Falls, but there don’t seem to be too many takers today… well none. I personally think you’d need to have your head read to even think about trying this, which I hope explains the apparent lack of thrill seekers on hand today.
We’re told that in really cold winters (we wouldn’t survive even an ordinary cold winter here) a “sugarloaf” sometimes forms at the base of the Falls. This a massive cone shaped ice block, and we see pictures of a thirty metre
high example that formed during a cold snap in the early nineteenth century. It looks absolutely spectacular, and is a bit hard to reconcile as we stand under blue skies and mid-twenty degree temperatures.
So far we’ve eaten Moroccan and Italian for dinner since we’ve been here, which doesn’t seem all that appropriate in a city renowned for its Frenchness. So tonight we go French, and my steak comes with a copious quantity of excellent French fries - which apparently may or may not have originated in Belgium, so I hope this still counts as a French meal……
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Montgomery Falls
Next time we are in the area we will have to go check this out. Fabulous.