Exploring Quebec City

Friday, May 25, 2018--Quebec City

The center of Quebec City is very congested.  Last night, we managed to explore most of it and made plans to return again tonight rather than during the daytime when it would be even more congested with traffic.  Instead, we spent the daytime today at several parks strung along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Our first stop was Montmorency Falls just north of the city.  It is another water falls--not as wide as the one at Grand Falls yesterday, but with a longer drop.  Water was rushing over the falls.  There is a suspension bridge for walking just over the top of the falls which reminded me of the walkways over the Iguazu Falls on the Argentina side except they use metal grates for the walkway in Argentina, and the suspension bridge here was wooden allowing only slight views through the cracks between the boards.

From there, we drove to the first of two sections of the new Park Promenade Samuel-de Champlain.  This section, near the bridges crossing the St. Lawrence Seaway is a small one with a tower to climb with views of the seaway.

Next, we moved to another section of the Park Promenade Samuel-de Champlain.  It is also fairly new and is filled with lots of sculptures.  Several of them moved with the winds.  Some were rather plain, while others were quite interesting.  They have a copy of the Angel's Wings sculpture which Mexico has given to several cities, including San Antonio (in HemisFair Park) for people to take selfies while standing in front of the wings.

Our final park was probably the best park in the city--Park Plaines d'Abraham.  It is a major park with museums, sculptures, statues, old military fortifications, etc.  We parked for about an hour and walked by some of the prominent features--several museum buildings and a statue/garden honoring Joan d'Arc.

On the way back to our hotel, we stopped at a nearby Costco to get gas because it was priced about 7 cents a gallon less than at stations in town.  We had tried to stop there last night, but the lines to get gas were impossible.  They were still long today.  They had at least 8 lines of cars with at least 7-8 cars waiting in each line behind those who were pumping gas.  I took photos!!  But we decided to wait while we were there.  It took at least 10 minutes to get up to the pump.

Not long after we got back to the hotel, there were rain showers.  But they passed, and we went back downtown in the evening.  We parked in the same place and we explored the same general region of the Old Town as last night.  It was fun this time just watching people, looking into the shops and bars, and seeing what we could find down small streets.  About 1 1/2 hours after we got there, it started to rain slightly again.  Since we had already seen everything and had a day of travel ahead of us, we just returned to the car and drove back to the hotel.

Quebec is a nice city.  It is much bigger than one might expect.  The downtown area (combination of the lower town, the old town, and the modern downtown is HUGE!!  Besides the beautiful old buildings to see, there are quaint squares, lots of statues, etc.  It's a very good place to visit.