Saturday, July 10- Quebec, Day 3

The girls were itching to go to the water park today. It doesn’t help that our current hotel doesn’t have a pool, and the one next door has one with a waterslide. The weather was very nice today, and the temperature was back to bearable levels, so we went to Valcartier Vacation Village to let them play. First, Anna and Emma enjoyed the wave pool. Anna especially liked swimming underneath the waves and found a dollar in quarters at the bottom of the pool. Anna went down the “Everest” water slide, over 34 metres high (more than 110 feet). Emma enjoyed going down the smaller slides. In a pirate themed section, the girls were being shot by water cannons. Julie’s favorites were two “lazy rivers” that you floated along in tubes. Emma sat on Mom’s lap while Anna floated in her own tube. It was good that Emma wore her swimming vest, since it allowed her to try many things. On her first try, Anna fell straight through the tube and disappeared under the water as Mom and Emma laughed. One of the lazy rivers had a dragon theme and one had an Amazon theme, giving you many things to look at as you floated by.

Around mid-afternoon, after several hours at the water park, we got the girls to reluctantly leave, and we went back into downtown Quebec City. We visited the museum at the Plains of Abraham, where the battle that was the turning point of the French and Indian War occurred. It’s possible that if the French had won here, not only would Canada have remained French, but much of the rest of the continent might have as well. We had a little trouble getting near the museum and park because a big street festival was happening with concerts in the park. We weren’t interested in that, but we found the museum in time to enjoy its multimedia presentation. The program, called the Odyssey Multimedia Exhibition, showed the history of the plains, from the time that they were settled by Abraham Martin to the present day. We dialed in number two for English on our headsets and proceeded through 3 different theaters. The first showed projections of actors playing the British General Wolfe and the French General Montcalm who explained the importance of Quebec to each army. The program was not afraid to put a little humor into the history to make it enjoyable. The second theater focused on the battles that took place on the plains, and the third was a whirlwind summary of the rest of Canadian history through Confederation up to present day. It was interesting how they incorporated actors playing the historical roles into well known images of Canada’s past.

After exploring the rest of the museum, we went out onto the Plains of Abraham. The battlefield is a landscaped park, and Scott wanted to track down the monuments to Generals Montcalm and Wolfe, both of whom died here. We found the monuments marking the locations of the French and British lines, and Scott did get his picture at both Wolfe’s and Montcalm’s monuments. Meanwhile, the three girls enjoyed the park as we walked along. Emma was chasing all of the black squirrels that she saw. We came back through the street festival, where a band was playing rockabilly and restaurants had taken over the streets to seat people. We decided to call it a day at that point and say “au revoir” to Quebec City.