Chateau de la Terrasse Dufferin Quebec City

There was little life on the empty streets of the Old Town which became old probably hundreds of years ago and never came back to life again. Sleepy cafes with strangely impotent coffee, bored prostitute on the stairs of the Museum of American Civilization, an ice rink with cheerful French music from municipal loud speakers but few skaters around - hardly a better place to spend another hundred years in lethargic oblivion.

The stories of Quebec City being a piece of Europe located right here in Canada are so true. The buildings, the streets and the shops are intriguing and offer much to explore. We board a free electric shuttle that motors all through old Quebec. We venture ...

We depart mid afternoon to Toronto and catch a delayed connection to Quebec City to arrive very late Thursday evening. Our stay is at a the Hotel Chateau Laurier, a mid range full service hotel adjacent to the Military Armoury. The room is small but the price is just right. There is a St Hubert Chicken in the Hotel - this place also serves breakfast.

... a stunning piece of architecture with great vaulted ceilings and a myriad of little and not-so-little chapels tucked into every corner. Great pillars at the rear of the sanctuary were festooned with crutches and canes and the like for which the faithful had no further use. As luck would have it a Mass began shortly after we entered and it was quite moving to hear the mighty organ booming and a very capable cantor singing the verses. It was also sad, however, because ...

... weather forecast I decided today would be an ideal day to discovered Quebec City as the weather looked amazing today but pretty bad for the rest of the week. So caught the bus into town. The public transport in Canada is very good judging from the cities Ive visited so far. Spent the morning & afternoon exploring. visited the tourist info centre who again were very helpful, picked up a map and list of things to do, places to see. One of which was a circular walk around the city, so ...

Today we drove into Quebec city, we found a 90 minute car park near the Plains of Abraham park, and proceeded to tour the park, the upper and lower city by bike. We returned three times to confirm the truck hadn't been towed or the tires marked by a parking warden, fortunately we were able to stay there all day without getting a ticket.  Quebec is a ...

... groomed and the advertised gradual incline from the start proved to be just that - the gentle 1-in-10 that I was used to.

The scenery was stunning with tracts of open farmland undulating in the shallow valleys through the wooded hills overseen by an almost cloudless piercingly-blue sky. Whilst there were a couple of minor dips and one major one (where the trail crossed the La Blanche river) these were dealt with by my new ski-carrying technique.

My aches worked ...

... My days were filled with lots of relaxing enjoyabal chats with strangers, walks up very steep hills, eating the epic breakfasts they serve at the hostel and drinking at the bar in the evenings. There was in continuing my canada tradition a total nut-job at the hostel, this big massive fat woman who walked about muttering to herself staring at people and eating humungous bags of crisps then chicken wings and everything else in sight! Nightmare! Anyway i ...

... wasn't too bad. The written exam was quite hard - we had about six different parts to do; some where grammar exercises with the subjunctive, the passé composé and the imperfect, one was a mistake-spotting exercise and the hardest bits were the ones with the Québecois phrases and slang. For one part we were given another extract that we had not seen before from a book by Michel Tremblay. We had to summarise what happened in it and then translate ...

... things that you don't think twice about normally. For instance, the taxi had the steering wheel on the 'wrong' side, it drove on the right and the traffic lights were also completely baffling - they seemed to have fitted them sideways. Another thing is they don't have any number plates on the front of the cars here - just on the back - that can be a bit unnerving when you look at a car - there is still a space for it and everything. All of the Québec number ...