Saturday 24th June – Quebec City (including epic public transport fail)

Planning to have a late night we didn’t feel the need to rush in the morning, heading out to catch a bus and then a ferry over to Quebec City at 2pm.

The view across to Quebec City from Levis

Chateau Frontenac... it's hard to take a bad pic of this incredible building

 

What a stunning old town.  The best way to see the sites appeared to be random wandering and getting lost.  We’re good at that. And did I make Simon walk to the top of the citadel?  Of course I did!  We did lots of walking, viewing as much of the old city as possible.  When it was time to stop for drinks we’d timed it to perfection as the heavens opened just after we’d nabbed one of the last tables in our chosen bar.

View of the city from the top of the citadel

City Hall

Thankfully, the weather improved so we finished exploring the city.  The hardest part was making the decision where to eat.  We eventually plumped for an Italian place which had lovely views through flower-edged windows out on to the character-full streets below.  We thought of this as a belated anniversary meal so took our time over our meals and a bottle of wine.

It's all about the up-lighting.... our restaurant looking very inviting

We’d wanted to stay until dark as Simon had read about how pretty the city looks from the ferry when lit up at night. Our plan was also to join the festivities…. But it turned out there was nothing on tonight as advised by our neighbours – the party & celebration was solely last night, we had missed the boat.  To avoid missing another one, we thought we’d call it a night early by getting the 10pm ferry back over to Levis. 

We arrived back at Levis to find a lengthy bus queue… phew, at least the buses were still running!  We jumped on the third double-decker bus that came along after waiting only about 15 minutes…. However, when we reached a supermarket car park after only about 10 minutes and every single other person got off the bus we started to feel confused.  And the bus didn’t appear to be going anywhere.  So, we walked to the front to converse with the driver – made extremely difficult by the fact that he spoke absolutely no English whatsoever.  I managed to understand enough of the conversation to translate that the bus route past our RV site had stopped completely for the night and there was no other method of getting back there other than taxi…. Or a 10km walk!  There wasn’t a single taxi around at our location but the driver explained he was returning to the ferry terminal so would drop us there, where we had seen available taxis earlier but chosen the cheaper bus option….  We had paid $4 to do a round trip and end up back where we started!  Luckily, there was still one lonely taxi waiting at the rank by the ferry port so we grabbed the driver and explained where we needed to go.  $32 later at 1130pm we arrived back at the RV!  This public transport fail reminded both of us of an incident we had in Paris about 9 years ago when we caught a train back from the city centre to the nearest station to our hotel.  It was reasonably late but pre-midnight and when we walked out of the station the streets were completely deserted! On that occasion we ended up walking around, failed to find a taxi and had to resort to going into a Police Station where an Officer called and woke up our hotel owner to come and pick his abandoned customers up!!  It was so embarrassing….. so, this Quebec City incident was mild in comparison.  The moral of these tales….. don’t underestimate how early French people call it a night on the weekend!  They do not live a 24-hour lifestyle!!