On The Road – Argiope – Quebec City Part Deux: we get around.

We’ll start today with a short 20-minute drive north of the city, up to Montmorency Falls.  These falls are nearly 100 feet taller than Niagara and we’ll get right up close to them. There’s a way to walk on shallow rocks down near the bottom, but since it’s early May it’s a might nippy out for that.  Instead, we’ll just park and do the short walk through the surrounding Montmorency Park to get to the main event.  See that bridge?  We just walked over that one and got some sea spray (well, technically river spray) in our faces.  The entire Riviere Montmorency comes through here on the way down to join the St Lawrence, and it’s coming from quite a ways to the north so there is a good bit of water coming through this gap.  The zipline wasn’t running today—too early in the season, I’m guessing—so instead we got a nice walk in on both sides of the falls and down to various observation points.  There’s an old hotel with a fancy restaurant up here, Montmorency Manor, and many places to picnic.

And here are the falls again, this time with the Manor in the frame for scale as well as some observation points.  We’ve hiked around here quite a bit and enjoyed all the rushing water, and now it’s early afternoon so let’s head just across the St Lawrence from here to Ile d’Orleans and see if we can find some wine, cheese, and other pleasantries.

This island is just across the bridge from Quebec City and is positioned just before the St Lawrence broadens out heading north. There are several small communities positioned around it, and it has a number of wineries, produce stands, vacation homes for rent, and the occasional goat farm. The one we stopped at had goat milk ice cream (don’t knock it, it didn’t taste even a little like goats smell) and 4 kinds of cheese. We now have small pieces of all 4 kinds in the car because how could we not? We also stopped at a winery devoted to black current wines, Cassis Monna et Filles, and came away with some black current port, some black current aperitif, and some black current wine because once we tasted them, it was clear they would constitute the majority of our duty-free bottle allotment.

Next, let’s taste some of the local wine and cheese. Look over there!  On this lovely patio facing the vineyards and the river, we can see Montmorency Falls tumbling down across the river.  Who cares how this wine will taste, the view is dynamite.

The wine is…not terrible.  The cheese is enthralling. We’re all good here.  Let’s just spend an hour or so before finishing the drive around the island and heading back to the city.  Because we’re doing a flight, including trying a couple of whites made from local grapes and also an orange wine.  Which….have I mentioned the cheese is incredible? That number on the left is an exquisite little semi-soft with a line of ashy salt going through it.   We may not need dinner after all.  Though we would deeply regret it if we didn’t eat at one of the fantastic Quebecois food-centric offerings in the old town, so let’s save a little room.

Crepes.  Oh la la.  In Quebec City, they are available for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  This one is made with buckwheat flour and contains confit duck leg, some variety of delicious local melty cheese, caramelized onions, and some baby spinach.  It was fantastic.  Everything in this restaurant was probably fantastic, but we didn’t have time to try it all because we needed to prepare for the next day’s trip.  Rest up, we’re gonna get an early-ish start again tomorrow.

I promised you moose crossings.  Note that I did not promise you moose, which is good because we didn’t see any.  It is the next day and we are heading away from Three Pines territory, which is further south and east of QC near the Vermont border, on the other side of the river.  Instead, we are heading north towards Tadoussac and taking the same route that Gamache et al. took when searching for Peter Morrow in The Long Way Home.  Tadoussac is 3 hours from the city and we have not fully recovered from the drive to get up here.   We still have to drive 13 more hours southwest to get home again, including a stop in Lake Placid, so we’re skipping the whale-watching opportunities up in Tadoussac and promising to return for those someday.  Instead, we’ll go up to Baie-Saint-Paul, a little community of galleries about an hour north of QC.  This town is featured in Louise Penny’s 10th book and is where the gang meets Marcel Chartrand, owner of the Galerie Gagnon, while searching for Peter.  The drive is glorious, with lots of rolling hills.

We’re heading into the town at the bottom of this hill, and you can see the baie.  Bay. Whatevs.  Anyhoo, there’s a visitor center just ahead on the right with a cool display of the area’s geography and how the bay came to be.  There are also the mandatory pamphlets with area attractions, like whale-watching boats, shoppes (the kind with the -pes on the end; you know the type), and summer water activities galore.  It’s still a little chilly here in early May so we’ll skip dipping our toes in and hug the shore.

And what a nice shore it is!  Here you may see sailboards and kites, meet some dogs, and shuffle down the sand for a bit.  Hungry?  Ready for some art?  OK, let’s head into town.

And here we are.  We parked by the church and walked the rest of the town in about an hour—two big streets filled with art galleries and restaurants, plus some other galleries on side streets.  These are filled with Quebecois artists whose work you mostly haven’t heard of.  Some of it is quite good.  And some is kind of like the orange wine back at Isle de Bacchus: someone worked hard on it, but it’s just….not as spectacular as the cheese.  Still, in this town there is an adorable café/bookstore/reading room perfect for a light lunch on the go.  There’s also the Contemporary Art Museum that has some nice exhibits if you’re into that kind of thing.  We did not find Peter Morrow, but some of y’all know why.  Unlike Gamache and the gang, we also did not fly further north at this point, just looked wistfully up-river and thought about running away from home long enough to cross it and explore the Gaspe peninsula.  Then we sighed, turned the car around, and headed back to the land of patisseries in QC.

Au revoir, Quebec.  We enjoyed your old city walls, your food, your friendly people, the lovely nearby scenery, the lack of firearms, the pride flags, the easy walkability, and the amazing indigenous art on the top floor of your National Museum of Fine Art.  We enjoyed the waterfall, and just wish we had more time to explore the river towns farther north.  Next time, we may even try out Montreal.