A rude awakening this morning at about 4:00 am!  We thought we were the only guests in the motel, but some French-Canadian men were housed in rooms just down the hall from us.  They arrived back from some where in the middle of the night and decided to have a conversation in the hallway.  I tried to ignore them, but after several minutes I got up and stuck my head out our door.  They immediately noticed me and excused themselves, but it took them several minutes to disperse to their rooms.  At least there was no prescribed time for breakfast like at the B&Bs, so we were able to “sleep in” this morning (until 8:00 am).

We dined in our room on the delicious pastry we’d bought on Saturday, which went well with our instant hot chocolate.  It was a nice start to a dreary and ugly and sometimes wet day (only the second day of “bad” weather so far).  There was a steady mist and low hanging clouds for most of the morning, but a wind came up (we suspect it was related to the weather front created by Hurricane Kyle that’s headed toward Maine and Nova Scotia, Canada) and the ceiling rose quite quickly so that we had only grey clouds over us.

We drove to the area east of Québec City to visit a church built in Saint Anne-de-Beaupré in the late 1600s.  It was a magnificent structure and a marvel to have been built in that era without the modern mechanical and engineering technologies available today.  It’s apparently a religious attraction like the cathedral in Lourdes, France, because many “pilgrims” come to visit this church annually (according to signs posted around the church area, and the fact that there is a church-run hotel across the street).  It also has some interesting associated buildings and displays which Mom photographed.

We began our drive back toward Québec City, but turned south and drove over a high bridge so we could tour L’île d’Orléans, a huge inhabited island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.  There were lots of berry and apple farms where their wares were being sold in stands along the roadways.  We even found a pumpkin patch and a corn field maze.  They celebrate Halloween in this part of Canada, so it’s interesting to see the piles of pumpkins offered for sale and some of the fields where they’re growing.

We broke with our tradition of picnicking for lunch.  We’d found an ad for a place where chocolates are made and sold, so decided to try to find it and eat lunch there.  It wasn’t a problem to find the place, so we stopped and had a nice sandwich and a bowl of homemade soup.  We then continued our tour around the island (probably about a 60-mile round-trip), but we cut through the center of the island to keep our visit (and mileage) short.

When we arrived back in Québec City, Mom got us to the area where our B&B is located, but we drove around for several minutes trying to figure out how to navigate the one-way streets.  Once we located our street, we headed in the direction of the address, but came to an intersection where the one-way direction changed across the intersecting street.  After a couple of “passes” trying to figure out how to gain access to our street in the proper direction (sounds like a Navy pilot who can’t get his plane back onto the aircraft carrier), I decided to stop in the street across the intersection and back into our street so I’d be headed in the correct direction.  Our building was only a couple of doors from the intersection, so we were able to park near the corner and unload our bags.  The B&B offers paid parking and it’s only in a small lot across the intersection where I was having so much trouble getting the correct direction.  Anyway, it’s a quaint little place on the third floor of a very narrow building, which means steep, narrow, winding stairs to climb with all of our baggage.  Reminscent of some of the places where we stayed in Europe!

After getting settled in, we made a walking tour of some of the area of “Old Québec.”  It was a walled city surrounding a fort on a high hill where many of the original buildings are still standing.  It was fun to walk and look at history dating to the 1600s, in spite of the cold wind coming off of the St. Lawrence River and the steady mist coming from the gray skies above.  This area is really what we’d expected, representative of the France we know.  We checked many restaurants (they all post their menus outside their doors), but chose one that specializes in omelettes.  Mmmm, an omelette filled with delicacies and accompanied by “frites” and a nice piece of French bread! It doesn’t get much better than that (except for snails in garlic butter with lots of French bread to sop up the butter).  We had to walk up a steep hill on the way back to our B&B, but it was good for our digestion.

We hope tomorrow’s weather will be more accomodating so that we can continue our walking tour of the wonderful sights here.