Previous – Québec City 1

Dec 29 – I slept a bit better that night. The sick people were gone for one thing (though the damage had been done). We had grocery store bagels for breakfast with red pepper hummus and havarti cheese and cucumber. The toaster had one slot broken so Tharash nearly set one half of his bagel on fire. The weather wasn’t that bad, so we went to the lower old town, stopping in on the way at Notre-Dame.

There was a small museum exhibit in what was probably formerly a chapel, dedicated to Saint-François de Laval, the founder of Catholicism in New France. Apparently he did a lot of traveling to try and get to all the people in his new diocese. I was not thrilled with a story they posted about a young Indigenous boy who got really terrified of going to Hell so left his home to go live with the religious people. Poor kid. That probably messed him up for life.

From there we went to the museum, which was very busy – full of kids. There was a featured exhibit on the Titanic, but that cost extra and not what we were there for. Instead we went to a small exhibit on First Nations languages, and then started on the main First Nations exhibit but I needed food to read more captions so we went to the museum café. We got grilled cheese and vegetarian focaccia sandwiches, which came cut in half so we split them. He had a London fog which came with two teabags and was still kind of weak, and I think I had some juice.

We were waiting for a guided tour, and it was great. The guide may have accidentally gone overtime from unintentionally giving us “Indigenous History 101” but it was just what we wanted really. I think Tharash now properly understands the full picture – not just how First Nations people lived before European contact, but how different groups of Europeans interacted with different First Nations, how the relationships changed over time and why, and roughly where things stand now. Also they had a very big canoe, so big Tharash said it reminded him of a small Viking longship. The material in this museum was focused entirely on First Nations groups within Québec (rather than the big museum in Gatineau trying to cover all of them)  – which does include Inuit and Innu people as well as Algonquian and Wendat and others, so still a wide range of cultures.

Then we went down to a pier on the river and looked at the ice floes drifting slowly by, and contemplated what would happen if we fell in.

But we didn’t fall in, and went back to the tourist shopping street, which was very slushy; stopped in at a woodcarving shop, where everything was 50% off, and unlike stone carving, actually within my budget – I bought a fridge magnet of a sugar shack. I’m sure it’s the sort of thing that can be dashed off in not much time – not compared to the gigantic polished wooden sculpture of an octopus – but it’s cute and doesn’t contribute too much to the clutter in my life. The guy was kind about my attempt to speak French, too.

Then we headed back up the stairs and into Mary’s Popcorn; I was going to get a bag of classic caramel, buuuut they gave us a sample of maple popcorn and I was sold. Even a small bag was pretty big though, it lasted us until dinnertime. The shop was very busy; for me it was the caramel smell they pump into the surrounds that got me in and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. It was nice and fluffy and crispy.

For dinner Tharash made a tofu stirfry. And I’m going to complain again about the hostel here; one of the things that really bothered me about it was that although there was a shoe rack near the front door, no one takes their dirty snowy boots off when coming inside so they tromp dirty ice water all over every floor. Tharash had brought slippers so his feet were okay (although he’s going to have to wash his slippers thoroughly) but I ended up using my fluffiest socks for it – the ones that feel like shag carpet inside. I’ve put them through the wash since I got home, but I’m going to put them through the wash again, poor things got rather abused.

I was starting to notice signs of sickness, my throat was starting to feel scratchy, so when we went out in the evening to walk around and see all the pretty lights, I also dragged Tharash off so I could buy Robitussin from the only pharmacy in walking distance that was still open. I got extra-strength and also a pack of Halls. At least we walked past a nice church before going back to walk around the upper city again.

And I slept badly again.

Dec 30 – I was definitely sick this morning, and decided to check out early because if I couldn’t get any rest I wasn’t going to get better. I’d eat the cost of the last night of lodging so that we could leave our stuff there (I’m not sure they would have given me a refund on the same day anyway) and we booked a hotel that was on the cheaper side, though it was a bit of a walk away, but it had at least two beds. I only had half a dry bagel for breakfast.

Someone else also had a cough at breakfast and I brought my cough syrup down and asked if he wanted some, so he had a spoonful. I have to say the medicine was behaving really weird??? It was more like jelly than syrup. I had a spoonful of my own Robitussin after I got home and it was normal, but this stuff… if you weren’t careful when pouring it into a spoon, it would pour itself back into the bottle when you turned the bottle upright. Super weird.

Tharash went out to do an audio tour like we had done in Montreal, but the wind was SUPER cold and miserable, with snow, and halfway he stopped at a café to get a subpar “chai” latte that was mostly milk. I stayed in bed and tried to rest, tried to stay hydrated, and read some of Thief of Time. I think Susan’s boy is rather a lot like her father in personality (and is weirdly the same age as him in his own book). Well, I’m not complaining, I like Mort (and not just because he’s a lanky freckly redhead with a penchant for wearing black and dark themes), and I like Lobsang too.

After lunch (the other half of the bagel with some hummus) I wanted to go out and see the museum at the Plains of Abraham. It was a bit of a hike in my condition, but we made it and were greeted by a lady in period costume. I had to rest a bit (and my glasses were really fogged – I swear there was ice in my eyelashes by the time we made it) so it was nice that the English video explaining Montcalm/Wolfe was just starting. Then we went to the third floor for the related exhibit, where a guy in period costume directed us to the beginning of the exhibit (because the elevator does not take us there). They had some examples of uniforms, and an entire 6-pounder cannon just like the two that Wolfe had hauled up the cliffs to help in the battle (very impressive that they got them up there). I chatted with the guy a little about his outfit, he explained that the common soldiers had to carry swords as part of the uniform but they were really cheap crappy swords so they didn’t get used in actual battle.

The middle floor had an art exhibit on Benedict Arnold’s failed attempt to attack Quebec City; they gave us an iPad with headphones, on which there were audio/video files of a lady narrating in the voice of a real historical person. To go along with that were six artworks that were… vaguely connected to the story, divided as it was into six segments for presentation. Some of them were kind of out there. Sometimes it’s nice to have the artist’s thoughts on what their piece means, to give a deeper understanding of what it’s about, some extra nuance, but when you need the artist’s walkthrough to even understand the art at all I’m not sure it has succeeded as art. There were also two mosaics based on real paintings from the 19th century that were quite nice, I liked how one of them used ceramic fragments and pearls to depict blowing snow and snowdrifts, but… it’s basically fanart. Just show us the original paintings.

Then we went back to the hotel, checked out, nearly forgot our food (and my shopping bag) in the fridge (but remembered), and hiked to our new hotel. It was a very long walk for me; Google I think said it should take half an hour and I took twice that. Tharash eventually took over dragging both rolly bags. Getting into the hotel door was difficult; it was in a vintage house (I bet a former apartment building?) so there was no lobby, so there was no reception – only a code. Two people consecutively stopped to help us, a gruff old man and a lovely young woman, both of them wished us a Happy New Year. Then it turned out we went in the wrong door anyway, that there were two doors to get in and the other one was closer to our room, and we had to wait in the lounge for like half an hour for the cleaning person to finish cleaning our room. (as an aside, there were two Japanese women eating dinner there, they had take-out and said “Itadakimasu”, I don’t often hear Japanese spoken in the wild so that was interesting to me.) I said to Tharash “Next time pretend not to be Dutch for 15 seconds and let me book the modern expensive [Best Western] hotel.”

The lady cleaning our room was super nice though, apologetic that it was taking her so long, but she shouldn’t have to – we did book super last-minute and it turns out that our room was really large so of course it took a while. And then we actually got into the room and it was amazing. It was clearly for a family of four, a big queen bed and two single beds; Tharash let me have the queen bed (for one thing it was at the far end of the room) (for another thing he’s not fond of gigantic beds) and I had FOUR PILLOWS. There was owl decor in the kitchenette, a wonderful modern bathroom – if it had just been a bit closer to the city centre, it might have been a great idea to stay there from the start.

Tharash looked for take-out options online and found a sushi place. I had a shower and it was WONDERFUL, the best shower of the whole trip (but the sushi confirmation email said they would need the credit card holder to show ID and I hoped that when he went to pick it up they wouldn’t make me come down too because I washed my hair and it would freeze out there, but they didn’t ask him about it). We each got a miso soup that… turned out to have deep-fried tofu in it? Weird, and it also had a strangely rich spicy flavour. I also got a 6-piece avocado roll. Tharash had a veggie spring roll, which was more like a wrap in rice paper, and also some ‘Imperial rolls’ which were more like what I think of as spring rolls.

Dec 31 – Tharash went grocery shopping again before we checked out, we needed more bagels. He also picked up a bag of clementine oranges for the Vitamin C, and a small bottle of orange juice for me. Then we headed out. I was feeling better, though I had weird feverish dreams the previous night, which I feel were at least partly inspired by Pratchett’s Thief of Time (something to do with family, geometry, and quantum physics). We spent our last change on taking the bus halfway, which helped too.

One thing that happened when I was trying to sleep was that my chest hurt, so when we were looking for the car rental office I stopped in another pharmacy and got some Advil. This ended up being useful for other reasons later.

At the car rental place, there was only one poor guy working the car rental desk, and a whole bunch of people came in after us. He was going to be busy for a while. He commented on my phone number, which has a number of 6’s in it but not all together – he deliberately got his own phone number with 666 in it because he wants to be metal, I guess. Anyway, the other guy got the car out of the garage for us, which would be great except I got behind the wheel and had no idea how to put it in drive. Then another car came up behind us and I started panicking until the guy came back and explained I needed to be holding the brake in order to shift – duh, in retrospect. Driving out of Québec City was actually pretty easy, the main highway west is only a block away and and then you just keep going.

The car was pretty smooth for an automatic, but… I still vastly prefer standard transmission, you can tell how fast you are going from knowing the gear and hearing the engine; since the automatic handles the gears for you, it’s more difficult to tell without watching the speedometer. For me, anyway. And the inside is too modern, especially the part where you turn it on or off with an on/off button. There’s proximity detectors, which is okay I guess, but there’s also a feature that detects if you’re going over the centre line or the edge of the road and vibrates the steering wheel, which I can see some use for but also how it can be used as a crutch. Tharash says his driving instructor was warning him that a lot of people take advantage of it to be on their phones while driving. How typical and awful. The seat warmers were nice, at least, and the volume control was a physical knob and not some touch-screen silliness. Though the rest of the radio was touch-screen, and in fact would not allow a bluetooth connection with a new device while the car was in motion (probably to make sure the driver wasn’t doing it). So Tharash, after failing to connect his phone to the radio (and apparently it didn’t like my vintage iPod either), just turned up the volume on his phone and we listened to Nightwish’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful album. My voice was not good for singing that day lol.

We took an exit in Trois-Rivières for lunch at a Tim Hortons right by the exit. I had a BLT like normal and a cappuccino, and Tharash had a vegetarian habanero wrap and a chai. He wanted a London fog, but they were out of Earl Grey. The lady was super nice about it though. Also I made him sit not directly across from me, and we were both wearing masks in the car. Tharash acquiesced to all my sick paranoia, and he hasn’t gotten sick yet.

Back on the road, we listened to Visions of Atlantis’s Deep and the Dark album, and then Tharash put on Unleash the Archers’ cover of Northwest Passage, partly because he was wearing his Northwest Passage shirt. And then we were more or less in Rawdon, our destination. We stopped at a grocery store to get food so we wouldn’t have to go out for at least a day; I accidentally parked in a traffic lane because it was so busy and slushy that I couldn’t see the lines on the ground, but a considerate person pulled up next to me to explain that I was incorrect.

Then we drove to our hostel, Auberge Estonia. This one was more like a lodge in the woods, and you can even get little cabins even further in the woods; it was super cosy and the receptionist lady was also super nice. Tharash made the tofu stir-fry for dinner again. By this point my nail polish was really starting to get wrecked. XD

Jan 1 – Ah, blessed rest! Tharash went for a walk around the hostel in the morning, exploring some of the paths through the forest of the property. The tree branches were covered in ice and the sun glittered off them and it was very pretty. I, however, did not have to leave the building and it was splendid. I am pretty sure I read books, probably got started on A Brief History of Nearly Everything, tried to do some creative writing (I have three fics in development, you know – FFXIV, Star Wars, and an actual original fantasy novel that I’m writing in collaboration with Yllamse) but I still didn’t quite have enough energy to be very creative. Tharash got some writing on his own original story about Greek philosophers, and of course we watched the annual Journey to the West episode.

Although I discovered that day I was getting my cycle a bit early; I had assumed I would not on this trip and only had back-up supplies. Crap. At least I had those painkillers to deal with the cramps, and I ended up acquiring more supplies during subsequent grocery store trips.

Next – Les Aventures Ligouriennes