Day Eleven, Quebec City, QU, All Day

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Greetings from Quebec friends, family and onlookers,

Today was a very enjoyable and educational day. No rain, blue skies and white cumulus clouds--just beautiful. After sleeping in for the first time in ten days, we had breakfast at the hotel and headed for the local laundromat to purge the dirt and road grime from our clothes.

Departing the laundromat, we headed for Premont Harley-Davidson for T shirts, some oil and cable lube. Bill's clutch cable and Lane's throttle cables are protesting the humidity and rain that we have been subjecting them to and are as stiff as by back in the morning. We grabbed a quick lunch and headed back to the hotel, where Steve was kind enough to purchase us all tickets for an afternoon bus tour of Old Town Quebec, a major tourist attraction with a rich history.

The shuttle van picked us up at 3:15 and transported us to Old Town where we met our tour guide and boarded the bus. For the next two hours, we drove through and around Old Town Quebec and got an interesting history lesson from our tour guide. During one stop, Steve purchased some post cards and asked the tour guide if it was alright if he dropped them in the green box along side the road. She said, "Sure, but that's a trash can sir. The mail boxes are red." Old Quebec is a walled city with a fort situated at the narrowest part of the Saint Lawrence River, one of the longest rivers in North America extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, to fend off attacks from the English, and later the Americans.

Old town is now a quaint collection of restaurants, hotels, speciality shops, bistros, boutiques, clothing designers and artists. There is still a military presence at the fort but it is largely ceremonial. There is also a park adjacent to the fort, designed by the same man who designed Central Park in New York. The park is used today as an entertainment venue for concerts and other events. There is another interesting event that occurs during the evening hours in Quebec that we did not get to witness due to the late hour and our intention to get an early start tomorrow. Along the waterfront is a huge grain elevator with approximately twenty silos joined together. At night they present a slide and light show against the side of the elevator depicting Quebec's history. I'm told it's spectacular and I'm sorry we didn't get to see it.

After our bus tour, we walked into the most famous hotel in Quebec, the Chateau Frontenac (see photos above). It's a grand old world 18 story hotel in the theme of the great French chateaus. It was constructed in 1893. It has hosted kings and presidents as guests. Furthermore, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met there during World War II to discuss the D-Day invasion. Regrettably, the hotel was not within our meager budget. We're lucky to be in a Holiday Inn Express today!

Following our "look-see" at the Chateau Frontenac Hotel, we walked to Lowe's Le Concorde Hotel where we rode the outside glass elevator 27 stories to the circular restaurant at the top for supper. At the risk of overusing the word spectacular, it was spectacular! The restaurant has ten foot tall windows 360 degrees around its circumference, and it rotates one entire revolution every 90 minutes giving all dinner guests a spectacular, there I go again, view of the entire city and surrounding area. As the sun set, a light rain began to fall looking like a pale grey curtain across the horizon, and a half moon peeked in and out of the dark clouds, reflecting ever so slightly off the water of the Saint Lawrence River, adding to the ambiance of the evening. Did I mention it was spectacular?

We caught a cab back to our hotel, uploaded every one's photos, cranked out a blog page, and called it a night. I hope you enjoy the photos.

"The Horck"