Bienvenue au Québec — Week Two on the Road
The border crossing was supposed to take about twenty minutes.
We got in the wrong lane immediately — the right lane, which moved at roughly half the speed of every other lane from the moment we pulled in — and once Winifred is committed, Winifred is committed. Three cars ahead of us, a drug-sniffing dog flagged a red car. Three big guys got out. The car got emptied onto the pavement: bags, boxes, everything that had been in that trunk, spread out in the May sun while the dog went through all of it methodically. We watched from our spot in the wrong lane. We had nowhere to be except Canada, so we watched.
When it was over, the red car merged back in front of us to cross.
I spent the next forty minutes genuinely hoping their paperwork was in better shape than their back seat.
Two checkpoints: first the general inspection and dog patrol, then passport control. I had spent the day before gathering every piece of documentation Ariel might need — rabies certificate, vaccination record, proof of microchip, the whole folder. The passport control agent barely glanced at any of it. The whole interaction lasted maybe ninety seconds. Ariel, for her part, was asleep in M’s Jeep and completely unaware that she had a file prepared for this moment.
We crossed into Quebec on a Friday afternoon, two and a half hours after we’d pulled into the queue.
Quebec City Snapshot
- Location: Quebec City, QC
- Duration: 8 days
- Miles from Lake Placid: 241
- Must-see: Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré
- Ariel’s rating: 🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾 (made a friend, achieved celebrity status by proximity, required zero documentation at the border)
The Drive In
One of the things we’d worked out on the highway east toward Quebec City was that driving directly behind Winifred creates serious wind disruption. The drag made M’s steering genuinely difficult, and during a stretch of construction where lanes narrowed, she moved into the left lane to block passing cars and realized that putting some distance between the vehicles made an immediate difference. From that point on, she led. I followed, reading directions aloud through the open phone line.
It was a different dynamic than the first week, when she was behind me. There’s something specific about watching your kid’s Jeep in the rearview mirror versus watching it pull ahead, navigating turns before you do. I noticed that more than I expected to.
We pulled into the Quebec City KOA in the early evening, tired from the border and the drive, and let the campground settle around us.
Days 1-2: Getting Our Feet Under Us
The first thing we did in Quebec was fix things, which honestly felt good.
The AC problem, which had been plaguing us since the heat wave in Corning, turned out to have a simple cause and a deeply annoying access situation. The filter needed cleaning — a clogged filter can freeze the evaporator and kill the airflow, which is exactly what had been happening. The problem was getting to it. The previous camper had the filter panel right there, easy. Winifred’s is behind a cover held in by star-shaped Torx screws, which I do not own a driver for. Except, it turned out, I sort of did. The screwdriver I’d bought at Walmart on the winter trip had adapters in the handle, and one of them fit. We got the panel off, cleaned the filter, let it dry outside, and put it back. The AC has worked fine ever since.
The leaf in the bathroom ceiling fan, which had been rattling on the spinning blade since day one and keeping me awake for weeks, also finally got evicted. M took the lead on that one, which involved getting the fan housing down and navigating an automated electrical component that I would have found genuinely confusing. She handled it like a pro. When we got the leaf out, we discovered it was half spray-painted white. It had come from the factory that way, built into the fan from the beginning, which means Winifred was born with it. The fan vent has a screened cover, so nothing could have flown in. That leaf had been riding around in there since the day she rolled off the assembly line, spray-painted and waiting.
M handled the whole job. I helped by staying out of the way.
Ariel made a friend that Saturday. Sugar was a golden lab from a Quebec family camped nearby, about a year old and operating at full puppy energy. She escaped her leash at some point and galloped directly to our screen door, where she pressed her nose against the mesh to get at Ariel. Ariel, who has occasionally uncertain feelings about high-energy dogs, was completely calm about the whole thing. They touched noses through the screen. We overlapped at the campground for three days, and Ariel’s opinion of Sugar never wavered.
Day 3: Our One Real Day
Sunday was our only real day in Old Quebec — the historic walled city, the cobblestones, the part that looks like someone dropped a corner of France into North America and left it there. We spent the morning at mass at Notre-Dame de Québec, the city’s cathedral, and afterward toured the church. There’s a holy door there, set into the stone, that’s only opened during Jubilee years. This wasn’t one, so the door was closed, but you can read the history of it on a panel alongside.
M found a sandwich shop around the corner for lunch and made a bold choice: prosciutto and cheese on a baguette. She did not enjoy it, not even a little. She ate a solid half of it anyway, which I respected, and somewhere in there we had a conversation about trying new things when you travel but always mixing the unknown with at least one sure thing, so you don’t end up actually hungry. This conversation would prove relevant approximately seven hours later.
After lunch we walked around the Château Frontenac, the big castle hotel perched on the cliff above the river. The views of the city and the St. Lawrence from up there are the kind that make you stop and not say anything for a minute. We walked around Old Quebec after that, in and out of shops while M looked for patches and stickers and small metals to put into her scrapbook and memory books, until we were absolutely starving.
Dinner was at Restaurant Parmesan, an Italian restaurant in the old city that someone had recommended. I had pasta bolognese, simple, and it was the best meal we’d had on the trip so far.
One more thing about Sunday: Ariel’s morning walk around the campground. I kept hearing a strange sound, like a tapping in the trees, and eventually found it. A woodpecker was trying to build himself a home in an electrical pole. I took a video. By the time I’d been standing there long enough to get decent footage, other people at the campground had noticed me pointing my phone straight up at this bird, and then they started filming too, and then other people came to see what we were filming, and within about ten minutes the woodpecker was a minor celebrity at the Quebec KOA. He didn’t seem to notice or care.
Days 4-5: Indoors
Monday, it rained overnight and confirmed what we already knew — there’s a slow leak where the slideout meets the camper body, one we’ve been aware of since the winter trip. We decided to deal with it later, and went to an indoor mall called the Galerie, which M had specifically wanted to see. She’s been talking for a while about wanting to experience old-school indoor mall energy, the kind that existed when we were growing up, when malls were genuinely vibrant and alive. The Galerie delivered something in that direction, partly because it had an entire indoor amusement park inside it — a Ferris wheel, a small roller coaster, an ice rink, a high ropes course. We didn’t do any of it. We ate lunch in the food court while watching the rides operate, which was genuinely fun in its own way, and then walked the mall for a while. I got a haircut, which was long overdue. M found some things. It was a good quiet day.
Tuesday we went to the Quebec Aquarium, which M loves — aquariums or zoos are a travel constant for her. This one was moderate in size, about two hours to work through, but it had a feel that was different from the aquariums we visit in Pennsylvania or the Southeast. Located further north, it leaned into a polar and Arctic character, with displays and animals that reflected the environment you don’t encounter as much down the coast. Interesting for exactly that reason.
That evening we watched The Night Manager. M picked it — Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, six episodes of the first season. It was a well-made show and not remotely something either of us would normally watch: drugs, guns, violence, the whole apparatus. Good, but intense. I fell asleep at a normal hour. M was up most of the night, wired from it, eventually watching episodes of The Great British Bake Off to bring her nervous system back down to something compatible with sleep. She has since announced, clearly and without room for interpretation, that she will never watch the second season. Her suggested alternative, for anyone interested, is to just watch Tom Hiddleston as Loki and Hugh Laurie as House separately, in their respective shows, without the guns.
Day 6: Campground Day
Wednesday was a campground day, and a good one. M worked through her schoolwork. I caught up on emails and some work I’d been carrying around. It was a genuinely pretty day, and I spent most of it outside in the sun. When you’re sitting outside at a campground in Quebec City with your laptop, working on things that actually need working on, and it’s warm and quiet and there’s a bird somewhere, that’s a pretty good Wednesday.
Day 7: The Shrine, the Stranger, and the Restaurant That Never Served Us
Thursday was our last full day in Quebec, and it was a lot.
We drove north of the city to the Basilique Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, which is dedicated to Saint Anne, Mary’s mother. The shrine on that site goes back to the 1600s — the current building is technically the third shrine on that spot, as the other two burned down, which is either a remarkable run of bad luck or a remarkable persistence. It is enormous and beautiful, and the mosaics on the floor and the paintings on the ceiling and the relics in their cases are the kind of thing that genuinely requires time to take in properly.
We’d arranged a private tour in advance, fifty dollars for the two of us, with a guide who had assured us he would conduct the tour in English. He did. It was just not great English. We made our way through. He was very knowledgeable and the tour was worthwhile — he walked us through the mosaics and the floor and what’s on the ceiling and the relics, all of it — but somewhere in the middle, a woman we’d never seen came up to us and asked if she could join. The guide explained it was a private tour. She asked if she could pay to join it. We said yes.
She gave us ten dollars. We paid fifty.
She proceeded to ask the guide, at length, about every element of the shrine, in a very direct way that was not quite aggressive but was somewhere in that vicinity. Neither French nor English was clearly her first language, though whatever her first language was had the sound of a romance language. So you had her asking very pointed questions in imperfect English to a guide who was answering in imperfect English, and the two of them going back and forth about exactly which relic was where and what it signified, and M and I spent the second half of the tour making sustained and pointed eye contact with each other. It turned, as I put it later, from a very lazy kind of tour into an almost militant tour. She was actually a perfectly nice woman and she shared some things about the lower level that the guide hadn’t covered. We used her ten dollars to light candles.
Also on the grounds: a replica of the Scala Santa, the holy stairs. The originals are in Rome, and I had climbed them years ago — you go up on your knees, pausing at the relics embedded in the risers. Here was a reproduction for those who won’t make it to Rome, or who want another opportunity to make the climb. I went up. M, who had been patient with the militant tour and the morning mass and the whole long morning, had hit her limit. She went back to the car. I can’t blame her.
I had picked out a restaurant in downtown Quebec City called La Chope Gobeline. Medieval-themed, based on the photos: wood paneling, heavy furniture, a suit of armor inside the door, meat served on daggers and swords. I had thought it would be a fun place to have lunch, and M had identified something she’d eat on the menu, and I wanted the meat-on-a-dagger situation.
Downtown Quebec is under extensive construction, spanning multiple blocks in every direction, with lanes blocked off for what appeared to be miles in service of work happening only in very small sections. Parking directly in front of the restaurant: blocked. We turned the corner. One-hour parking limits on every side street within four blocks in every direction, which I figured had something to do with a school nearby, but regardless: we were going to need more than an hour. I found a spot, set a timer on my phone so I’d know when to go move the car, and we went in.
The restaurant was beautiful inside. We were the only people in the front rooms. We could hear the server talking to someone in a back room. He came and gave us menus. The menus were wonderful, illustrated with the whole medieval setup. We read them, we looked at the pictures, we talked about what we wanted to order, we discussed the history of the restaurant printed on the back.
He never came back.
After twenty-five minutes (I had a timer on my phone because parking had a one-hour limit), I told M we should leave. We put on our coats and walked out past the empty tables and through the door. Nobody appeared. We walked down the street, got in the car, and drove back to the camper, where we made dinner and it was the best thing we’d eaten all day, because at that point the bar was very low.
M did the laundry that evening and got everything clean and ready for Montreal. I got the camper prepped to travel. We were leaving in the morning.
Day 8: On the Road
One thing I want to document about driving in Quebec before we leave it behind: there are very few white lines on the road.
This is not an exaggeration. From the moment we crossed from New York into the province, the road markings dropped off noticeably. Roads wide enough for two or three lanes had no lines, no dotted center line, no shoulder delineation. You looked at the available space and picked your spot. Even busy commercial roads running alongside the highway — gas stations, restaurants, traffic in both directions — had nothing painted on them. You negotiated your position spatially with the cars around you and everyone seemed to manage.
M figured out the merging system before I did. In the US, a blinker means you’d like to move into that lane when someone creates an opening. In Quebec, a blinker means you’re coming, and the car beside you will brake to make room. Not aggressively — there was no anger in it, no horns — that’s simply how it works. Put the blinker on, move your nose into the lane, the space opens up. Someone waved M over before she’d even decided she had room to go. Once we understood the system, it made complete sense. It’s just not the system we know.
The drive to Montreal was about 150 miles. We packed up in under thirty minutes, M in front and me following, the phone open between us, and headed back west on roads that may or may not have lanes.
Road Trip Rhythm
“Une seule vie” — Gérald de Palmas
One life is all we have – and we get to spend it like this.
Favorite Snapshot
Quebec City had given us a lot. A border drama, a woodpecker celebrity, the best pasta I’ve had in a long time, a tour guide pushed to his limits, a restaurant that completely forgot we were there. We lit candles at a shrine and watched our dog make a friend through a screen door and got the AC working and evicted a leaf that had been living in the fan since the factory. We drove through a province that paints very few of its road lines and merges by consensus and has somehow made the system work.
