A walking tour of Old Québec City

We had a very pleasant walking tour of Old Québec City this morning with our guide Valentina. Normally, the tour would include a funicular ride from the lower city to the upper city, but they were doing repairs this morning, so we had to walk up the 62 meters between the two levels, but we did get to take the funicular back down afterwards!

Here are a few photos from the tour.

La Vivrière at Place de la FAO
Fall colors on the cliff above the lower city
Notre-Dame des Victories (the oldest stone church in Canada, though it is a reconstruction)
Louis XIV in the center of the oldest part of the city. It reminds me of the opening of Beauty and the Beast (Disney version).
La Fresque des Québécois (created jointly by local artists and muralists from Lyon)
View from the French battery
Umbrella Alley (being taken down for the winter as we walked past!)
Halloween is coming!
Fairmont Le Château Frontenac
Former Post Office
Closeup of the Chien d’Or (Golden Dog)
Organ in Notre-Dame de Québec
Altar of Notre-Dame de Québec
Looking across the St. Lawrence from the Fairmont

After the tour, we had a very nice lunch at La Buchette in the upper city, then took the funicular down (there was no line at the top; there was a one-hour line at the bottom!) to walk back to our hotel.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry at the closest laundromat I could find, a ten-minute Lyft from the hotel. It was uneventful and gave us a little downtime…and saved us about $200 (Canadian) compared to having the hotel send out the laundry for us.

Our dinner this evening was at La Galette Libanaise – basically, a little meat and a lot of salad vegetables on a pita. Inexpensive, but nothing to write home about, so we went hunting for dessert and found wonderful gelato at Tutto Gelato in the upper city. I’m eagerly waiting for my Apple Watch to congratulate me on increasing my “daily flights climbed” soon!

A little walking, a lot of riding

This was our last day in Montreal, and I missed a final chance to relive a traumatic experience from 2000 while we were there. Our hotel is next to the skating rink where I suffered a concussion, and every time we passed it, I was tempted to go in and see it…but Diane helped me resist the urge.

Instead, we walked right past it and on to the old port area, passing a number of interesting old buildings on the way, as well as a very striking artwork in the lobby of the National Bank of Canada.

Scentime (Shary Boyle)
Édifice de la Banque Scotia (Beaux-Arts, 1908)
Grand Trunk Railway Building

It was a lot colder than it had been yesterday, so we didn’t spend a lot of time at the old port, but we did walk along the Lachine Canal (the predecessor to the St. Lawrence Seaway) for a short distance before returning to our hotel.

Tug Daniel McAllister

We took a different route back and were startled to see a Paris Metro entrance at Victoria Square – it is on an indefinite loan from Paris to Montreal to commemorate the work of Paris engineers on the Montreal Metro and the linkages between the two cities…and yes, it’s a real entrance to the Montreal Metro!

We took the train from Montreal to Quebec; it was a pleasant trip, mostly through farm country; the trees were much farther along in fall colors than the ones we’d seen in Montreal.

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We arrived at Gare du Palais about 15 minutes behind schedule.

Our hotel (the PUR Hotel) was a ten-minute Lyft ride from the station. It’s not as upscale as our hotel in Montreal, but it’s perfectly acceptable (and has faster Internet).

We took a little walk around the neighborhood to find a place for dinner and ended up at Phil Smoked Meat for smoked meat salads and beer; it was fine, but I liked Schwartz’s Deli better.