Traveling with Bears: Canada: “The World Next Door”

By Jack Dold

Some years ago, a Canadian travel campaign aimed at the United States described the country as The World Next Door. It is a spectacular place to visit, the world that is so close to us, filled with sparkling, friendly cities, incomparable natural areas, world-class museums and national parks, and lovely people who invariably welcome the visitor. Jack Dold, Director of Golden Gate Tours of California, takes the reader on a coast-to-coast tour, exploring nearly every facet of this beautiful Canadian world.

Six imaginative tours with the alumni of the University of California, Berkeley, take you from Atlantic to Pacific and from the U.S. border to the Arctic, exploring Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritimes, the unique Province of Quebec, the frozen north of Hudsons Bay Company and the Land of the Midnight Sun along the Alaska Highway and the route of the Klondike. Visit Canadas superb cities, filled with welcoming people and attractive parks and museums. Enjoy the incomparable beauty of unfettered nature, and relive the drama of a nation of explorers and trappers and immigrants who slowly came to populate their enormous land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496906526

Jack Dold

In the course of my 81 years, I have seen a great deal of the world. From my early years in Berkeley, through education at Saint Mary's High, Saint Mary's College, and U.C.L.A., I have been blessed with experiences that have far exceeded my dreams. The lessons learned from my teaching days at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland provided the base for almost forty years in the travel business. And both of those careers have given me the inspiration for my retirement work as an author.

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© 2014 Jack Dold. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 5/7/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-0655-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-0653-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-0652-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907334

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CONTENTS

Introduction

The World Next Door

Canada—A Magnificent Land

Newfoundland

Canadian Maritimes

Québec Province

The Hudson’s Bay Company

The Klondike

INTRODUCTION

1988 was the first year I traveled with Bears, on a two-week tour of the Canadian Maritimes. The trip was with BearTreks, the name for the alumni travel program of the University of California at Berkeley, Cal for those of us raised in the area. For me, as an owner of Golden Gate Tours, it was a proud moment, because Cal was known to have one of the finest alumni travel programs in the country. The Golden Bears did indeed travel the world. Tour operators battled to secure one or more of their offerings.

At that time, most alumni travel was directed to exotic foreign destinations, like Nepal, or Egypt, or Central Africa, which undoubtedly were more attractive than domestic sites, especially for highly educated people. I always credited that to what some called the classic education, where travel abroad was considered a vital ingredient of the well-rounded curriculum. Travel in America was called a vacation. Thus my first tour with BearTreks was to a foreign country—Canada. And the Maritimes, that rather esoteric combination of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, almost qualified the tour to be labeled exotic. It was immediately successful, filling three separate departures that year.

Four of the first five tours I conducted for BearTreks went to Canada. The Maritimes tour was followed by a trip to Newfoundland, then a bus-train adventure from coast to coast; and finally, a journey into the far north of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. In four tours we visited all ten provinces and the two territories that existed in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In all, I escorted sixty tours for the Cal alumni over a period of twenty-five years, many of them one-of-a-kind itineraries. BearTreks, which derived its inspiration and success from the leadership of Carolyn Sheaff, and later Jackie Olson and Kris Jameyson, set a very high standard in demanding of tour operators that the educational component was to be the backbone of each tour. To accomplish that end, each of the tours I escorted was hosted by one of a cadre of upbeat, gregarious U.C. faculty who graciously applied their expertise to the program through lectures, formal and informal, discussions and seminars. I was privileged to be able to travel with Mac Laetsch, Art Quinn, Vince Resh, Patrick Hatcher, Bob Hirst and Doris Sloan, who brought to life the history, culture and natural history of the regions we visited.

And then there were the alumni travelers—the Golden Bears, as they would identify themselves. I can only say that in my forty years of group travel, they stand out collectively for their love of life, their passion for learning and their interest in just about everything. With the various professors, we built up a following that waited eagerly to register for the next offering, so that each new tour was not only a different adventure but a reunion of old friends. We had an extraordinary rate of recidivism! One of the notable features of our tours was the fund of combined knowledge possessed by the travelers themselves. Time after time, as we rolled across the country in our motorcoach, I called on their expertise to amplify our understanding of what we were seeing and experiencing.

This book is about Canada, but it is also about those wonderful people and professors who explored that great land with me. Of the sixty tours I did with Cal, twelve went to Canada. I have selected six which cover just about the entire country, from Atlantic to Pacific and from the U.S. border to the Arctic. There will be some repetition because cities like Québec and Montreal figure prominently in several of the itineraries, but I have found that each of those cities offered new experiences with each visit and the repetition is surprisingly minimal. The tours are in geographic rather than chronological order. While they are definitely dated at times, I have tried to bring them up to date wherever possible. Surely most of the tour guides have retired, and some restaurants have closed their doors, and hotels altered their names, but Canada, that World Next Door, as their tourism slogan declared before the Millennium, remains a sparkling, majestic, immensely lovely land populated with gracious, gentle people. In my mind, it is a land of beauty and tranquility, willing to share its spirit with all who venture across its borders.

THE WORLD NEXT DOOR

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Canada really doesn’t have a vivid, clear-cut national history. Provincial history seems to rest more solidly in the minds and memory of its citizens. In one sense, the nation is rather a long string of ten countries, or maybe four or five regions, but at least until recent times the thread of national identity barely tied them together. The Confederation is made up of ten provinces and three territories, the First People filling up most of the latter—the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavik. The rest of the country is a 4,000+ mile stretch of occupied land, barely a hundred miles from south to north, beginning at the U.S. border and stretching to the overriding Canadian Shield, that hard granite belt that virtually crosses the continent. Someone called the Confederation politically impossible and geographically inconceivable. The Confederation which dates from July 1, 1867, has been expanded from the original four British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Lower Canada (Québec) and Upper Canada (Ontario), to include Prince Edward Island to the east (1873), Manitoba (1870) and Saskatchewan (1905) in the plains, and Alberta (1905) and British Columbia (1871) in the far west. Last to join, in 1946 by a vote of sorts, is Newfoundland/Labrador. There can’t possibly be ten more different lands purporting to be one nation, and actually pulling it off. In fact, most of Canada’s provinces may have more in common with the American states lying south of them than they do with the province next to them. The Maritimes, including Newfoundland go nicely with New England. Ontario, Canada’s industrial land has many ties to the Great Lakes states. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are certainly northern extensions of the plains states. Alberta can easily tie to Montana and Idaho, or perhaps Texas from a natural resource aspect, while British Columbia stretches north from Washington and Oregon. Only Québec is completely different. And whether known as New France, Acadia, Lower Canada or Québec, it has always been different, both from the lower English colonies as well as from its own fellow provinces.

There are several historic threads that comprise the theme of Canada’s history—existence and independence leading the list. It is a fascinating question how Canada has managed to survive, both before and after 1867. Founded by the French with a later British overlay, it has been attacked by the colonies and nation to the south many times from the seventeenth century to the War of 1812. Several times, parts of the region have been lost, mostly to Britain, during what was collectively known as the Second Hundred Years War or the French and Indian Wars, but they have always been retrieved by treaty. It was left for the last of those wars, the Seven Years’ War, to see the land north of Colonial America finally transferred for good from French to English hands. But that transfer only makes the story of survival more amazing. In 1763 there could not have been a British possession more different in every way than Québec or Lower Canada—a Roman Catholic, French speaking, agricultural, sparsely populated land that had nothing at all in common with the rest of Britain’s colonies in North America, indeed in the world. Twelve years later, the southern thirteen colonies rebelled successfully from the motherland. When the dust cleared, only Québec remained of England’s eighteenth century North American possessions. During the revolution, Lower Canada even withstood a major Yankee invasion that reached the walls of Québec and Montreal, emerging at the Treaty of Paris still firmly in England’s possession. Obviously Mother Britain was preferable for the habitants and seigneurs of Québec than the aggressive Yankees south of them.

And so it went with the rest of Canada. She has withstood the insistent advance of Manifest Destiny that asserted that North America was by nature an American land. She has endured and survived invasions by Irish Fenians, by New England Yankees, Montana cattle men, American fur companies, formal armies and navies in the War of the Revolution and the War of 1812. Her capital of York (Toronto) was burned down. Her ancient Fortress Louisbourg was destroyed and dismantled stone by stone. She survived a three-way vote in Newfoundland that prevented an east coast Alaska from being added to the U.S. She raced a railroad across the continent to prevent British Columbia from being annexed to the U.S.

And there she is—Canada! She is still alive and well, south of the 54:40 border aspirations of Yankee aggression, above the 49th parallel and north of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River; still hardly possessed of any consensus; still made up of fewer citizens than the state of California, one of the largest nations in the world with close to the smallest population density. And try as I may, I can’t recall a single time in her history that Canada has actually attacked anyone, although she has participated in any number of peace keeping forces and did have a participant’s role in Korea and the Middle East. How on earth can such a land exist?

If Canada doesn’t have a fluid national history, it does have a recognizable national personality. These are the gentlest people in the world! Canadians are endemically nice, treating visitors and fellow citizens with understanding and care, seldom cantankerous or mean, except possibly during Thursday’s Question Day arguments in Parliament. I say this based on the fifty or more extended visits I have made north of the border. I can’t recall ever being confronted by unpleasantness on my journeys there. One time, with a group from Stanford University, we were staying overnight in Sudbury, a mining town north of Toronto. Since it was a one-night stay, many of our folks left their large suitcases on the bus, taking an overnight bag to the hotel. During the night, someone broke into the bus. When the driver and I arrived in the morning, we discovered the break-in, with suitcases strewn on the ground around the bus.

Geez, look at that! Bill Nelson, the driver said, pointing up the hill.

Hanging from every tree were the contents of those suitcases—dresses, coats, underwear, all hung out over the branches like drying clothes. I went into the breakfast area and announced our problem. As the people came out, we organized them into teams, the women sitting on benches in the parking lot with their suitcases, the men climbing the hill to fetch the contents. As each dress or article of clothing was brought down, it was promenaded until one of the women claimed it. In short order, all of the clothes were accounted for, packed and the suitcases reinstalled on the bus. Actually we lost very little—a few cameras, the booze we had under the bus, a couple of leather coats and all of the men’s neckties. That last item will always remain a mystery. Of course, the police were called and the hotel manager was out apologizing to our folks. No one could give a rational explanation for the crime, except possibly teenagers who had had a few too many beers.

How un-Canadian! was the general comment. And that says it all about the Canadian personality. "How un-Canadian

Canada is possessed of fabulous cities, which are neat, clean, safe, generally modern, and attractive. Most are of manageable size since population pollution is not a problem. Even Toronto, the largest of them, can be visited in a day, if that’s all you have. We had a tour called The Great Cities of Canada which jumped in two-night stays from Québec to Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto. A nicer parlay of cities would be difficult to find, anywhere. Each of those four has its own face, its own special personality. It is possible to carry that idea across the country from St. John’s to Victoria, from Mile 0 in Newfoundland on one end of the Trans-Canada Highway to Mile 0 in Victoria on the other. I could spend a week in every major city in the country. That highway is a necklace filled with metropolitan gems—St. John’s, Charlottetown, Halifax, St. John, Québec, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Windsor, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria. I’ll admit that Corner Brook and Kamloops are a bit funky, but still fun.

The cities are the focal points of activities that span the year, from winter Carnival in Québec to the Tulip Festival in Ottawa, to the Calgary Stampede in July. Antigonish, Nova Scotia hosts the Highland Games in August; Toronto sponsors an International Buskerfest while Montreal has its Rock Festival and an annual Grand Prix race. There are bathtub races in Nanaimo, BC and a Rock-Paper-Scissor Festival in Toronto. Of course, there are Inuit and Indian festivals throughout the land. America boasts that it is a melting pot of all of the nations of the world. Canada assumes the opposite approach, striving to maintain the national heritage, even language, of each of its citizens. Nationality pockets often have their own radio programs, emanating from Radio Canada in Montreal. Toronto newspapers are printed in more than a dozen languages. Perhaps nowhere is the ethnic pride more visible than in Winnipeg’s Folklorama every August, where each national group hosts a venue with its own language, cuisine, music, history and culture.

The cities are built for the people. Most have trains, modern bus systems or subways to move the population, headed by the impressive Montreal Metro. Many of the eastern cities have underground malls to protect their people from the vagaries of winter. Parks are numerous and continuously used by the people. Visit Montreal on any weekend in any season and you are sure to find dozens of parks teeming with families. There is a pride to Canada’s cities, a pride that is reflected in family-friendly neighborhoods and litter-free streets. Prince Edward Island has a cleaning day every May where every house, farm and avenue is swept clean of debris. Prizes are awarded for the most attractive house, farm, etc.

Canada is a natural treasure, with so much open space and such incredible wilderness resources. In 2012 there were forty-four national parks in Canada, of which eighteen are wilderness areas in the northern territories. There are four additional Marine Conservation Areas. All of the parks preserve the impeccable natural treasures of the land. There are more than 150 national historical sites as well, concentrated in the east where the population is most dense. Many of these commemorate spots where those unruly Yankees from the south attacked in half a dozen different wars. A large number are also dedicated to the three centuries of fur-trading activities in the far north and west. Isn’t it interesting that the Hudson’s Bay Company, that eminently British institution, was founded by two Frenchmen!

So why travel to Canada? Because it is beautiful, natural, reasonable in cost, with fine hotels, friendly people most of whom speak English. And if you only try your high school French in Québec, Acadian New Brunswick and the north shore of Nova Scotia, you will be treated to the most pleasant of smiles. Eh!

Taking an advertising phrase from Canada Tourism, this book is dedicated to The World Next Door, a simply lovely place—for Americans, close at hand and welcoming. You are invited to join me, traveling with the Golden Bears of U.C. Berkeley alumni, beginning with a spectacular beginner’s survey course, which, back in 1989 we entitled: Canada—A Magnificent Land.

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CANADA—A

MAGNIFICENT LAND

MAY, 2001

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If ever there was a tour that properly summed up a place it is this one. The title says it all. For years we did a couple of fairly standard itineraries in Canada, one in the east which I called The Great Cities of Canada and one in the west called generically The Canadian Rockies. I think it was the hotels we used that made me join the two into one majestic adventure. Across Canada one finds the finest string of hotels, in my opinion, in the world. I knew them as the Canadian Pacific Hotels, the C.P., the old, impressive railroad houses that welcomed a weary traveler on the Canadian Pacific rail system. The original hotels on the Canadian Pacific were almost matched by the railroad’s great competitor, Grand Trunk (later the Canadian National), that also developed a series of hotels along their line, including the Jasper Park Lodge, the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa and the Queen Elizabeth in Montreal. These were added to the C.P. chain in the 1980s. In 1999, Canadian Pacific added to the chain with the purchase of the Fairmont Hotels. Two years later, their core properties all took on the Fairmont name, while their lesser properties were moved to their Delta Hotel chain. We did three of these tours for Cal Alumni between 1991 and 2001. On the first two, the hotels were still called Canadian Pacific, but by the last, the names had all been changed to Fairmont. I have always preferred the Canadian Pacific name because I believe it is a proud one and should be retained. But from the marketing standpoint, it is undeniably better to use Fairmont.

Most modern travelers encounter these upscale hotels one at a time, but in the old days, the train traveler found them in every major city, a short walk from the station. I used Le Chateau Frontenac from the first time I ever saw Québec City. How could you stay anywhere else? The same applies to the Empress in Victoria. The place simply dominates the scene, making every other place look like a motel. Gradually I expanded my repertoire of C.P. Hotels to other places until I eventually found them all. Since they are spread from Québec to Victoria, (actually St. John’s, Newfoundland to Victoria), why not write a tour that would use them all?

I phoned Jack Rayfield, the U.S. sales representative in Los Angeles for C.P. Hotels.

Jack, if I write a tour using almost all of your hotels, will you get me a deal?

What do you mean ‘almost all’? he asked skeptically.

Chateau Frontenac, Queen Elizabeth, Chateau Laurier, Royal York, Jasper Park Lodge, Chateau Lake Louise, Banff Springs, Hotel Vancouver, Empress.

Good God! That’s one tour?

I’m going to call it, ‘Canada—A Magnificent Land.’ We’ll use VIA Rail in the middle.

I’ll get back to you.

Jack, one of an army of sales people who promoted Canada in those days, was back to me that afternoon, with low season rates at all of the hotels so long as I began the tour at the Frontenac before May 1. It was a deal I couldn’t refuse. We ended up with a twenty-one day tour, nine nights on the east coast, nine on the west with two nights on the train across the Prairie Provinces. I will always believe it was the finest hotel parlay of any tour I ever wrote.

I

It wasn’t easy getting to Québec from the West Coast. From San Francisco, we had to fly to Toronto or Montreal, and then on to Québec, often with a considerable layover. We didn’t get to that great walled city until 9:00 at night or later, but when I think about it, Québec may even be more impressive after dark. The ride from Aéroport international Jean-Lesage de Québec is a journey from the modern to the old, from Canada to France. It crosses the district of Sainte-Foy, which contains many of the modern hotels and restaurants of the new city, places that serve the traveling public who arrive in the city via the Pierre Laporte Bridge from the Trans-Canada Highway. But shortly things begin to change. Boulevard Laurier runs past Laval University and rows of schools and rather elegant office buildings. The boulevard then morphs into Grande Allée, the entry into a French city. Here are stately old mansard-roofed buildings, once residences, now apartments or restaurants. Here are sidewalk cafés, huddled behind wrought-iron fences. Here are the first of the government buildings, the ancient barracks, the arsenal, and one of the Martello towers that guard the walled city. And finally appear the walls of old Québec, massive ramparts that surround the old city. Québec is the only fully walled city left in North America. Passing through Porte Saint-Louis, the road name changes again to become Rue Saint-Louis. Surely we have arrived in France!

At the end of Rue Saint-Louis the land drops off in a high escarpment into the St. Laurence River. The cliff is marked by a large statue of Samuel de Champlain. Towering over the scene is the imposing Le Chateau Frontenac, our home for the next two nights. If there is a better way to begin a tour, I have not found it.

We have always used the Frontenac. There are other deluxe hotels nearby—Le Concorde, the Hilton, the Auberge des Goveneurs, but there is only one Chateau Frontenac. I used to tell people that the only good thing about the other hotels is that you got a wonderful view of the Frontenac. However a decade ago, it was by no means simple to bring a group to the place, because quite frankly, the Chateau Frontenac was falling apart. I used to bring the group into the lobby, where they would be thrilled by the opulence. Then I would hand out the keys and run for cover. Every room was different, from those the size of a closet to others where you could play a soccer game. Usually I scheduled a group dinner the first night on a tour, but never in Québec. By morning, complaints would be considerably muted. Today, $20 million or so has eliminated the angst of checking in at Le Chateau Frontenac. Walls have been removed, making a decent-sized suite out of three former single rooms; the décor has been revitalized, but thankfully, not modernized. Lighting and plumbing have been brought into the twentieth century. The whole place, like its hotel sisters across Canada, is vibrant with energy and customers.

I still leave the first night free in Québec City. Along Rue St. Louis, just a block or two from the Chateau Frontenac, is a string of very fine restaurants—Au Parmesan, Continental, Café de Paris, La Caravelle. My favorite is Aux Ancien Canadiens. This is a city for strolling, and the first night’s walk will also get you a very fine bowl of soupe á l’oignon graninee.

I have a trade secret about us tour managers. There are always one or two bars or restaurants in every city that we never tell our group about, because after ten or twelve hours a day with them, we sometimes need to escape, go somewhere where nobody can find us, if only for an hour or two. In Quebec City for me, that was La Biarritz.

I was on my way there when I got distracted by a new restaurant called La Saint Amour and I decided to give it a shot. I should have known by the name that this would be a mistake. Three people were leaving as I entered and they seemed contented enough. But their departure completely emptied the place and I was escorted to the back, past a score of unused tables, the waiter disclaiming that there would be a couple of more reservations joining me. I had already formed a dozen reservations by the time I sat down.

First, there was no aroma to the place, at least no attractive culinary wafts of enticement. To me that is the initial requirement for a good restaurant—delicious odors of garlic or coffee or savory spices.

Then, the room was far too bright. A good restaurant should never be flood-lit, nor should it be eerily dark. Saint Love was noon-lit and in the glare, I could see that very little care was being taken to the furniture and décor. Chairs were askew; tablecloths were slightly awry; tables were sitting at odd angles. Though not dirty or unkempt, it was just not cared for by someone with an organized mind. It didn’t make you comfortable.

There was no music. In fact there was no sound at all. Devoid of customers, there was no murmur of conversation, no reasons for pans rattling, no street noise through the closed doors. My ears had nothing to do. And they joined my nose in inactivity, hardly alleviated by my eyes which were hurting in the incandescent glare.

Then came the menu. Perhaps a nice glass of St. Emillon or Chateau-neuf-du-Pape would help. Wrong! The choice was between a Chilean cabernet, a Mondavi-Woodbridge merlot or an Aussie shiraz. Saint Amour was rapidly falling as I glanced at the a la carte menu which was certainly going to cost me $60 minimum, U.S.!

There are all sorts of ways to leave a restaurant.

I left my credit cards in the hotel.

I don’t like to eat alone. It’s too expensive to dine without a companion.

I was really craving Mexican food.

I don’t think I have enough time for a formal meal.

You don’t have French onion soup.

Yes, there are lots of ways to leave restaurant. I might have gotten a bit flustered as I stumbled toward the door, and I mumbled, It’s too bright in here. I can’t smell the music.

I don’t think the waiter understood my English as I scurried out, heading for the salvation of La Biarritz. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the familiar sign on Rue Sainte-Anne. But there was a sign on the door announcing that the place had gone out of business a week before.

Fortunately, I have a secondary escape in Québec—at the Bastille up on the hill, a neat little restaurant I discovered a few trips ago. I hurried up the hill and was relieved to see a light on at Chez Behuaud-a-la-Bastille.

Lucie Bechard took my coat as I entered, ushering me into a beautifully lit room filled with wonderful aromas of French cooking, with Edith Piaf murmuring some haunting French love song in the background.

Would you like a glass of wine?

Is your chardonnay South African, Chilean or Canadian? I asked tentatively.

It’s French, of course! smiled Lucie.

I’ll have two.

The meal was wonderful. It cost me $60 (U.S.) and I ate alone, the night’s only customer. But all of my senses joined me in the fine repast and, after all, what more can one expect?

II

Vince Resh is the perfect host for this tour. A prominent member of the Department of Environmental Science at U.C. Berkeley, Vince is an expert on the water systems of the world, and the myriad of issues that are bound up in that subject. Canada boasts 40 percent of the world’s water. The nation is a bridge between Atlantic and Pacific, with rivers that flow to three oceans, and the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway that are shared with the U.S. Water is a constant theme throughout the itinerary. Not only that, but Vince is profoundly interested in all living creatures, and Canada is a natural treasure to be examined and explored. The walking, swimming, crawling, flying creature does not exist that is not a potential subject of one of Vince’s over-the-road lectures. I have watched him get so excited about a damselfly or a land leech that everyone within earshot is entranced regardless of their natural instincts. Canada is the perfect laboratory for Vince Resh. He gave me a list of his proposed lectures, to be delivered while the motorcoach is moving down the highway, or anywhere where the people are gathered and looking around.

- How the St. Lawrence River and other Canadian rivers work

- Welcome to the Great Lakes! Here’s how they formed

- What made Niagara Falls?

- The geology of the Canadian Shield

- How the lakes of the Rockies work

- The Fraser River—the greatest salmon river in the world

- The life history of the beaver

- Canadian and American naturalist art

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Leona, from Contact Québec, is our guide today, a delightfully buoyant woman possessed of an easy-going, rather American style, phrased beautifully with a French accent. She is very proud of her city, rightfully so, especially on a sparkling early-spring day when the first vestiges of post-winter life are beginning to show as green buds in the gardens and red tips on the maple branches. We all met at the Place d’Arms, just outside of the Frontenac. By 9:00, most of our people have been out on the Promenade des Gouveneurs, the impressive wide boardwalk that covers the top of the escarpment giving visitors a grand view of the St. Lawrence, Lévis across the river, and the Isle d’Orleans to the east. Duferin Terrace rises above the promenade, with stairs leading up to the citadel and the Plains of Abraham.

Samuel de Champlain stands symbolically at the end of the boardwalk, next to a green kiosk which is the entrance to the Funiculaire, a cable car that takes tourists down the escarpment to the Place Royale below, where the city was first laid out. In the small habitable area between the river and the cliffs, is a rebuilt world of the seventeenth century, stone dwellings and warehouses, lovingly restored by the Canadian government, surrounding the church gem of Notre Dame des Victoires. What was a dilapidated slum ten years ago is now filled with boutiques, small restaurants, wine shops and upscale condos, lying in wait for the many cruise ships that dock nearby.

Leona’s tour began at the Plains of Abraham. Anyone coming to Québec quickly learns of the great battle between the French and English on September 13, 1759, where both commanders, James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, died of wounds inflicted on the field. While the battle itself may not be of heroic proportions, it resulted in Britain taking permanent control of French Canada in 1763, essentially making it her fourteenth North American colony. How strange that a decade and a half later, only Québec would remain loyal to London, while the Englishmen to the south all claimed their independence.

In 1791, Canada was divided into Lower Canada (Québec) and Upper Canada (Ontario), the latter attracting many English escapees from the lower colonies, while Lower Canada remained solidly French in culture.

Leaving the old city, the route then led across the St. Charles River to the north shore of the St. Lawrence and a region known as the Seigneurie.

Much of the land of the St. Lawrence Valley is laid out in French medieval fashion, with long narrow strips of farmland leading down to the river. In the seventeenth century the land was assigned to the seigneur, or lord, who distributed the rows to his tenants, habitants. This system remained through the British conquest, preserved by the Québec Act in 1774, and was finally abolished in 1854. Today the long rows can still be seen throughout the river region.

Also visible are the traditional French farmhouses with their sloping roofs and colorful paint, many built in stone. It is a lovely region, one meant for an afternoon ride.

The path eventually takes visitors to the impressive shrine of Sainte-Anne-du-Beaupre, the largest of several pilgrimage sites in Québec. The modern basilica, rebuilt between 1926 and 1946, is a marvel of stonework, its mosaics famous around the world.

Our last stop today is the impressive Montmorency Falls, higher than Niagara. Today we are seeing it from above, with dinner at the Manor Montmorency, a fine meal offered in a completely restored old mansion, with walkways down to the top of the falls.

We completely filled our day!

III

It would be a shame to leave this lovely city without giving people a chance to explore on their own. It is only a three-hour drive to Montreal, so I gave the folks the whole morning to wander, shop and take in the attractions. Across the square from the hotel is an artists’ alley, leading down to the Cathedral of Québec, and a host of modern stores. In the lower town, you can spend a morning just peeking into stone cellars and tiny shops