Whatever Travels: Bannock to Brioche

Do I have a story for you? Yesterday’s cliffhanger went off the rails in a big way after I posted! About an hour into the power outage the fire alarm went off. Nope, not kidding! Robin and Clare stared at each other for a few seconds (in the light of a flashlight), burst out laughing and decide to redress (out of PJs) before checking things out lol. Clearly they were not overreacting! I will give them full credit though, when they did go out, the took ME with them. Yay! Turns out, our neighbours decided to light a fire (in their room fireplace) and who knows what went wrong but their room filled with smoke. I’ll spare you the details, but it was nearly an hour before the alarm was turned off and we finally went to bed (oh yeah, the lights were on by that point, in case you’d forgotten the first part of the story). Fun night my friends!

Morning came too early for my companions, but they still managed to get out the door on time to barely make their breakfast reservation in Wendake (indigenous community just north of Quebec City, pronounced when-DAH-kay). The restaurant isn’t cheap but serves traditional indigenous foods in a modern format. We were all eager to try this, and breakfast was the cheapest option, so worth the early morning. The menu items were listed as “hunting”, “fishing” and “gathering” on bannock bread with eggs etc. Both my companions said it was worth it - I wouldn’t know.

We then explored the Huron-Wendat museum with lots of reading and listening but not a lot of doing, so I maybe kinda fell asleep. Clare insists it was interesting. I did like the longhouse though, and tried my hand at grinding something (corn, wheat, bits of sawdust they put in there to make it look good, I don’t know).

One thing I noticed, but can’t decide if it’s a positive or negative comment, is that the museum did not bring you out into a gift shop like almost every other tour I’ve ever been on. This seemed like a breath of fresh air, except that we actually wanted to look in it, and we couldn’t find it! Seriously, even when they said “end of the parking lot” we couldn’t find it. We wandered around for a while, eventually found the back of it and had to go around again to get inside! Ironically, there was nothing inside we wanted (good stuff, not tourist trinkets at all, just nothing we wanted).

Wendake is a small community, so we wandered around, checked out the falls and fountain that represents the Huron creation story and a number of stores that sold indigenous items (including a pair of moccasins for Robin). I wanted moccasins too, but they didn’t have my size (even tried the key ring pair, but no luck).

Quebec City is over there

Ready to move on, it had been a tie between Montmorency Falls and Île de Orléans ((Orléans Island)). A quick Google search decided for us as parts of Montmorency Falls park were closed today because the heavy rainfall had the water flowing way too fast for certain places to be safe. Île de Orléans it was!

I took a pic of this spot from that mountain!

First stop was yet another Information centre, right as we got off the bridge to the island, but this was totally worth it as she not only gave us a tourist map, but asked what we wanted to see, and marked off all the best places for our interests. Cool. The island takes between 1.5 to 2 hours to drive around, but I think we took 3 or 4 with all our stops. Totally worth it! We went to one end and took pictures looking across the river at Quebec City, and the opposite end of the island looking at Mont-Sainte-Anne (Beaupre, aka home). In between we checked out an amazing Chocolatier, a Fromagerie and a Bakery (I’m sure there’s a fancy French word for it but Clare says she’s tired, and somehow those two things are related).

By far, best stop of the whole day was the Fromagerie ((Cheeserie??)). It’s a goat dairy, but boy did they have a system… teach us about goat cheese and ice cream while letting us taste ALL the samples (various ages of cheese and then ice cream), and explain why most people don’t like store bought goat cheese products. Then send us out back to see the baby goats. I do not think I saw one family leave without buying something (mostly soft-serve goat ice cream, but many with a bag full of cheeses too). Who knew?

Finally we headed back off the island towards home, but not without passing Montmorency Falls in all its high-water level splendour (note GPS informed us flooding was further up that river and might effect our drive - it didn’t).

I’ve added a few extra pics to the end because I really wanted to share them but Clare said they didn’t fit. Don’t forget to check them out too.

So far the power is still on, and nobody has set off a fire alarm. Here’s hoping we get to sleep earlier, as tomorrow we storm the castle!

Whatever!