Our RV Adventures

(Quebec, once again)

Since we didn’t get home from the Alvin Opry until after 1am, I thought I’d repost our visit to Quebec, Canada in 2009

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Quebec

Originally posted on September 18, 2009

Today was our day to see the city of Quebec.

We started out with breakfast at our new favorite breakfast/lunch place, Cora. Hopefully these will show up in the US soon.

We drove around Quebec, finally ending up in Vieux Quebec, or Old Quebec where we found a Tourist Information Center.

Info Building

We found that there was going to be a 2 hour bus tour at 2:30 pm and signed up for it. Luckily for us, today was the last day for this tour, and, even luckier, it was all in English.

We’ve noticed a lot of touristy things are starting to shut down, or reduce their hours, due to winter coming on, and the tourist trade is dropping off.

We had some time to kill before the tour started so we drove to a Glass Shop on St. Jean street that Jan wanted to visit.

St Jean St

Finally we headed back to rendezvous with our tour bus. Our driver, a Quebec City native named Francois, spoke very good English, luckily for us. But Jan said he sounded like Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame.

Our tour gave us a look at the major sites in Quebec, in both the old and new sections.

Quebec Tour 1

Here is the Simons fountain in front of the Provincial Capitol of Quebec.

Simons Fountain

Here is the view from the Plains of Abraham battlefield site overlooking the St. Lawrence river.

Plains 1

The battle of Plains of Abraham, also known as the Battle of Quebec, took place during the French and Indian War in September 1759, and the British victory over the French led to France relinquishing all claims to Canada.

Here’s Jan with another view from the battlefield.

Plains 2

And here is the Chateau Frontenac Hotel, one of the most magnificent sites in Quebec. Built in 1893, the Frontenac is one of the premiere hotels in North America.

Hotel Frontenac

Here’s one of the many pedestrian-only streets in Vieux (Old) Quebec.

Quebec Tour 3

This church, the L Eglise Notre Dame Des Victoires (The Church of Our Lady of Victories) , is the oldest stone church in North America.

Quebec Church

Another view.

Quebec Tour 5

And this building, built in 1675, is the oldest one in Quebec City.

Quebec Oldest House

After our tour was over, we drove over to Tomas Tam’s, a Chinese buffet restaurant we’d seen advertised. And it was very good.

On our way back to the rig, we drove pass everyone’s favorite chicken place, PFK.

PFK???

Leave it to Quebec to put their own stamp on things.

PFK in French stands for ‘Poulet Frit Kentucky’, or Kentucky Fried Chicken to us.

Getting back to the rig, we got ready to head out early tomorrow on a long travel day.

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Thought for the Day:

How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear or understand a word they said?

afds

I headed out this morning a little after 11 to take another pass at the AT&T fiasco. My first stop was Fry’s Electronics to pick up a new DSL modem. AT&T Tech Support said that the problem was with the new modem they had just replaced, and wanted my client to buy the replacement.

When I asked if we could get our money back if that didn’t fix the problem. They said No. So I picked one up at Fry’s because I knew that after I showed AT&T that the modem wasn’t the problem, I could return it.

And getting to the client’s house, I plugged in the new modem and No, that didn’t fix the problem.

Surprise!

So back on the phone to AT&T I went. And lo and behold, I found Malcolm. Malcolm may be the only person at AT&T with any skills or common sense.

More importantly, he actually listened to what I was saying. I had asked last week if this DSL account was still set up to use static IP’s. I was told they no longer had residential accounts with static IP’s.

Static IP’s date back to the days before home routers were common. IP addresses are those strings of numbers you occasionally see on the Internet like 192.168.1.254. Every computer on the Internet has a different unique number. It’s like your computer’s phone number.

If you wanted to have more than one computer on your DSL line before routers, each computer was given a static IP address from the phone company. I knew this account was originally set up with static IP’s, and I knew that could cause problems if they didn’t realize that.

But when I mentioned this again to Malcolm, he actually looked it up, and found it was a ‘legacy’ account and it was still set up for static IP’s. Once we knew this, AT&T configured things correctly on their end, and in 5 minutes I had Internet again.

Well, 5 minutes and 6 hours, anyway.

I’m really glad that’s done.

About 5pm this afternoon we picked up Dennis and Kathy Brophey and headed up to Seabrook to Tookie’s for dinner. They had seen my blog comments about it and wanted to give it a try.

And they both said they weren’t disappointed.

Really good, as usual.

Coming back to the park we got a tour of the cabinet modifications Dennis and Kathy made to their Revolution LE. Really nice.

But it’s given Jan ideas. And that always means more work for me.

Came across an article on Yahoo about a place in Cambridge MA that serves really hot food. The dish is called Pasta Plate from Hell and one diner said this about it, “Pain. I can’t breathe. I can’t talk,” he said. “It tastes good at first. Now I can’t taste anything,”

Sounds like my kind of place.

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Thought for the Day:

"If You Want To Learn To Love Better, You Should Start With A Friend Who You Hate"

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