170917 Quebec Day 2

We have a Freechoice today to explore this charming city of Quebec.

The crossing over of the dateline confused me and I overlooked the fact that I have ‘doubled’ up on days. To correct this oversight, this post covers both Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th.

Saturday the 16th

Our early morning 10,000 steps today took us to some very attractive parklands around the quaint Quebec City. I am fast becoming a lover of this town. Everything seems organised, clean and functional. The people have all been friendly and helpful with lots of great smiles. Perhaps things are different when the heavy snows come after autumn. We found wide boulevards with large garden plots between the carriageways. The water trucks “sweep” the streets before too much traffic gets in the way of the work required to make the city clean and inviting to the many tourists that come here during the warmer months.

After another great breakfast, we took to the sunroof to enjoy the sunshine during morning nap time, and before viewing another busker down on the street. Most of the afternoon was spent waiting for the last two travellers to arrive in from Nashville and catching up on their 2 weeks in the Las Vegas, New Orleans, Nashville with a week on a Mississippi River Cruise. (We had originally wanted to include this for our group tour but the connections from Nashville to Quebec City was so difficult at the time that we had to abandon the great music tour and river cruise.) Sid and Sharon were willing to put up with the longish time wait between the tours, checking our various concerts in Nashville – how boring – NOT.

Sunday September 17.

On the first morning’s walk, I had noticed a motor home parked, most probably for the night, next to our 5 star hotel. When I posted it on the Motorhomes Australia Facebook page, someone came back to me and said they were in Quebec City too and had noticed that same motor home and had also noticed an area close to town that seemed to be a free camp spot for motor homes. After breakfast, I did a quick dash over to see for myself just what facilities were there. There would have been parking for a couple of hundred motor homes with a “pay as you park” machine facility. Come on Australia. Get with it for motor homers.

Included in Scenic Tours are “Scenic Free Choice” days, and today’s event was a helicopter flight over this beautiful city. This was the first time in a helicopter for some, but you could hardly notice their nerves affecting the plan. Standing around waiting for a helicopter flight is very common place, but none of that today. Our 30 minute transfer took us to the main city airport to a Helicopter Museum and training school and quickly into the preflight room and onto the ‘chopers’. Fortunately, our pilots were teachers rather than students and we were in safe hands.

We had noticed helicopters flying over the city on Saturday and now it was ‘us’ that were the joy riders. The tour is called Fall Colors of Canada and the USA. Evidence of Fall, or autumn, was starting to show as we flew over the residential area to where our hotel and the city and return, but there’s still a long way to go for the complete changeover from summer to winter. In a month’s time, we shall return to see this city again before our long journey home.

This will be the countryside in a few weeks.

Our afternoon was ‘free to roam’. Firstly, we felt like a light lunch of fruit salad and a drink. We found a crepier with live entertainment and enjoyed a strawberry, blueberry, and banana crepe. The hot chocolate was rather different too.

For the rest of the afternoon, we walked and walked to take photos of this very welcoming city before our ‘welcome’ dinner in the evening where we learned the ‘ways’ of the tour director for the next four weeks. Karen has been doing Tour Director work for around 20 plus years.