Day 6 & 7 – Grand Falls to Quebec

Day 1 – Grand Falls to Quebec

The Hilltop Motel offers a great breakfast included with their nightly rate, so we started the day off right with pancakes for Brian and Eggs Benedict and home fries for me – and of course loads of coffee.

The drive to Quebec was fairly dull, though still very green and pretty, but kind of featureless. We stayed on the highway most of the time, other than a bit where we drove next to the St Lawrence River. Quebec on first sight is a pretty place with lots of nice houses and old buildings. I managed to book a hotel right in the middle of the Old Town, and after checking in and parking we did a quick walk around the Old Town to get our bearings.

As we approached Quebec the weather for increasingly rainy and threatening, though not really that cold. After settling into our room we went walking and managed to cover most of the Old Town sights before it started raining and we had to go back to the hotel.

Evening time saw us looking for somewhere to have something to eat and drink, but Quebec being a very touristy town, everything was fairly expensive. We had a couple of beers and a couple of very good burgers at Les Trois Garçons before settling in at Pub St Patrick for another couple of drinks and spectacularly bad service – though at least the drinks were a bit cheaper than in the rest of the town! We got quite bad service in lots of placed in Quebec and couldn’t figure out whether there was a real language barrier as people seem to speak good English, or whether people just weren’t keen on English speakers!

Day 2 – Quebec

The hotel doesn’t offer breakfast, but there was a kettle to make some coffee and after a while we set off to explore some more. I’d read about Montmorency Falls and as we had all day we decided to go and have a look at it.

The weather was still not great but at least it wasn’t raining and we dropped off the car before walking along the Plains of Abraham and had a look at the Parliament Building and then made our way round the lower part of Old Quebec. Getting back up from the lower city wasn’t as easy or as much fun as going down, but at least it meant we got a bit more exercise (and steps) in!

We then decided to have some pancakes/crepes for lunch at Le Casse-Crepe Breton, which turned out to be a massive mistake as something got lost in translation which meant we waited about 45mins for 2 simple crepes. Though the crepes were ok, they certainly weren’t worth that amount of time waiting around for.

In the evening we decided to do a bit more pub crawling and went to a couple of pubs before ending up in Saint Patrick again, despite the previous night’s bad service!

While Quebec is pretty to look at there isn’t really that much to see once you’ve walked through it once and it is extremely touristy, with prices and attitudes to match. The hotel we stayed at is called Au Petit Hotel and was really cute and better than I expected for the price and location.