Friday, July 9, 2010- Quebec, Day 2

We started today by trying to get a traditional Quebecois breakfast at Chez Marie, a restaurant that Scott ate at with the school trips he came up with. We drove east of the city along the St. Lawrence and admired the Quebec houses. We found Chez Marie, but apparently they only do the breakfast thing for busses. We found another restaurant nearby for a good meal, but not as quaint of a location.

Then the adventures began outdoors. The heat was starting again, but we were determined to visit the Canyon Ste-Anne. This was another place that Scott had come with school groups, and he knew it would be just the place for Julie to try out her new walking sticks. The hike takes you down, around, and up over the falls of the St. Anne River. Three suspension bridges take you over the roaring waters, and the wooded trails are secluded and peaceful. Henry David Thoreau, the 19th Century author, said this place was, “a most wild rugged and stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow, where a river had worn itself a passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the comparatively untrodden wilderness. There is certainly a lot of hiking down and up the canyon walls. At one point, a sign warned us that we were about to go down 185 stairs and the only way back was to walk up them all again. We did that and a lot more. By the end, we were all very hot and sweaty, but enjoying it all in spite of the heat.

From there, we went to the more famous and more easily accessed falls of Montmorency. These falls are easily seen from the road that runs along the St. Lawrence River and are said to be higher than the falls at Niagara. In order to get the full view, we took the cable car up to the summit of the falls and walked on the suspension bridge across their brink. The view was wonderful there and the breeze was very nice.

It was well past time for lunch, but we started on the way to the water park that we had promised we’d try to take Anna to. However, the car has been telling us that our oil needs changing. Julie saw a Canadian Tire along the way, so we stopped there to get the oil changed while we ate at the Pizza Royale nearby. Julie and Scott both had flashbacks to the first day of our honeymoon in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Just like there, the car took slightly longer to fix than it probably should have, and just like in Altoona, the problem wasn’t solved when we drove away. We had all new oil in the vehicle, but the message wouldn’t go away. What was worse was that just as we were about to leave the Canadian Tire, a torrential downpour began with thunder and lightning. Our plans for the water park were now certainly cancelled for today, and since it was almost 4:00, most other things were closing too. We went back to the hotel to regroup and make a new plan.

Fortunately, we decided to try to find a “Sugar Shack” like the ones that Scott had visited previously. We drove back to the area we had been before, and crossed to the I’lle d’Orleans, the island in the St. Lawrence across from Montmorency Falls. The island is known for its quaintness and its Quebecois culture. We went to the sugar shack called the Cabane a sucre l’En-Tailleur. The family name in the name of the place was a play on the French word for drilling into the maple trees, and the family home there was said to go back to the one that was burned in 1759 during the French and Indian War. We were almost turned away because we didn’t know that we needed reservations, but we did get in, and were treated well. As it turned out, a bus load of Taiwanese students was expected to arrive shortly, and we suppose that this fact made it easy for them to slide four more people in.

The way most sugar shacks work is that they are built around the gathering of maple sap and its processing into syrup and sugar. Like the others Scott has seen, this one had a small museum to tell the story of the process. The man who took us through stumbled over some of the English, but was very warm to us. We didn’t know it at the time, but he also was the musician who was going to treat us to music during our meal.

The meals at sugar shacks are usually served family-style and everyone gets the same fare. We started with a bean soup, then a course of ham, beans, pork rinds, sweet pickles, sausages (in a sweet sauce), potatoes, and a home-made relish. All of it was very good. The girls were brave and tried most of everything, and Scott cleaned his plate several times. The final course was pancakes, with maple syrup of course. Since it was real maple syrup, it was not as thick or as sweet as the artificial stuff we’re used to, and it was much better for it. Then, everyone went outside where we were treated to maple taffy, made on long trays of snow. The hot maple is poured onto long troughs of snow, where it freezes immediately and can be wrapped around a popsicle stick. Julie and Anna liked this part the best. Throughout the entire meal, our guide was playing Quebecois music on a banjo, fiddle, or accordion. He invited people to come up and play spoons along with him. Scott could not get Anna to go up with him, but he went up alone to play spoons for one song. To judge from the cheers and clapping of the Taiwanese girls, he did a passable job keeping the rhythm, and certainly had fun doing it. Unfortunately, we never got the name of the musician, but we thanked him at the end for the great time that we had.