Old Quebec

Last July we drove up to Quebec City.  This is a picture of us with our tour guide who gave us a one hour guided tour of the city from a horse drawn carriage.

When I was a boy I had a book about the fur trade in Hudson's Bay that fascinated me.  I also remember a book in our home about the battle on the Plains of Abraham between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gave French Canada to England.  Later I read of the raids originating in Quebec on the New England Settlements by the Iroquois, and then of Benedict Arnold's journey up the Kennebec in December of 1775 to attack the city for the Colonial Army.  It has in a distant way always been tied to New England where I have lived all my life.  Where I grew up outside Boston, there was a large population of French Canadian immigrants who, in contrast to other groups assimilated so completely that they were almost indistinguishable from native borns,  save for their French names.

I took French in school and into college but, although I can read it pretty well, I can only piece together a few rudimentary sentences in real life.  Quebecois was unintelligible to me, to my great frustration at having wasted so many years studying French.  I imagine I could pick it up if I stayed here a year.  The French Canadians are adamant about sticking to their own language for fear of being swallowed up by the surrounding English speaking world.

It was a day long drive from the Boston area.  I looked into flying, because we only planned one weekend, but flying would have taken nearly as long as the drive because there were no direct flights.  I was used to driving from Vermont to Montreal and was always surprised how quickly the land leveled out after crossing the border.  The first time I did that I was 17.  Me and two friends bicycled from Watertown to Montreal.  The rural and mountainous land of northern Vermont suddenly gave way to tedious pedaling over flatland with open fields and rushing highway traffic.  The crossing near Shelbourne was different though.  The rolling green hills of the Green mountains continue for 30 miles or so before leveling out into the Saint Lawrence valley.

We had a good experience again with Airbnb.  We had a studio apartment with a private back yard for $70.00 dollars a night.  It was clean and private, although in a noisy part of the city, but we had been warned about that.