Category: Away we go

The boys are asleep in the back seat, Beloved is taking in some culture at the National Musee des Beaux-Arts and I am driving randomly through Quebec City, as relaxed as I’ve been since sitting in Nancy’s comfortable kitchen two long days ago. I start out driving rather aimlessly, and end up in a rather boring suburban neighbourhood that has the same big box stores every Canadian city now seems to have. I am pleased, however, to find a Tim Horton’s – our first in Quebec City – and maybe it’s the familiar caffeine burst that sooths my frazzled nerves as much as the sleeping boys and gentle loops I am making.

The boys should sleep for a good hour or more, their bellies full of the familiar tastes of home thanks to the most exquisite McDonald’s I’ve seen since the Champs-Elysee in Paris. Lunch on the patio of a 300 year old manor apartment converted into a McDonald’s on the Grand Allée, the most grand boulevard in Quebec, seems a perfectly reasonable compromise that leaves everyone content after our busy morning’s adventures.

I drive down to the old port, and circle the outside of the city walls, looking up the formidable escarpment first at the imposing Chateau Frontenac, and then at Battlefields Park. For the first time, gazing at the sheer face of the escarpment, I get a visceral understanding of the history of the place. I can see why Champlain stopped here, why the British fought for this land, what 400 years of civilization – 400 years of Canadian history – looks like. It leaves me feeling infinitesimal yet strongly connected to the past. I follow Champlain (the road, not the explorer) as far as the looming bridges that ford the St Lawrence to the west, and loop back around for another pass.

I begin to realize that Quebeckers tend to be such aggressive and poor drivers (I once heard a stand-up comedian opine that the motto on the Quebec licence plate, Je me souviens, does not in fact translate to “I remember”, but “I will be cutting you off in the near future”) because they have the most arcane, confusing road system known to man. Traffic lights take forever to change, and seem to do so not to assist the flow of traffic, but to impede it.

After almost two hours of driving, during which I cover surprising little territory due to the aforementioned traffic peccaddilloes, I finally feel like I know Quebec City, and I wonder why I didn’t do this the first night we were here. Eventually, it’s time to return to the Musée des Beaux-Arts to pick up Beloved, and I manage to miss the exit I need.

Full of bravado and my newly acquired sense of the geography of the place, I forsake my map and make random turns through the heart of the old city. I am temporarily lost, then get my bearings, then become lost again. I find myself for one embarrassing moment going the wrong way down a poorly (if at all) marked one way street, and I vow that if we ever return to Quebec City, we will not only get a hotel in the old city but park our car when we get there and leave it parked until we are on our way out of town.

The final entry in this series is the post script.

Beloved bought a disposable camera for Tristan to use on our vacation in Quebec City. Despite the fact that Tristan didn’t quite understand why this camera doesn’t immediately show the shot you just captured like our digital one does, I think the whole series of shots makes a wonderful collage of the old city from the perspective of a curious four-year-old. (These photos are actually scans of the index card the photo lab includes with each processing order.)

Continue reading Sketches of Quebec City with Part Five.

We are sitting on the warm pavement of the parade grounds at the Citadel, the site of the original military fortification at Quebec and still an active military garrison. We are hot and sweaty under a heavy grey sky, having marched uphill into the Citadel from the old city in double-time to make it in time to see the Changing of the Guard ceremony.

(If you are looking for a way to keep two preschoolers sitting still for a 35 minute outdoor spectacle, walking for a couple of hours through the winding streets of the old city and then running them twenty minutes uphill in dreadful humidity to get there is a pretty good way to ensure they sit in quiet stupor awe for the entire thing.)

I couldn’t resist at least one cheesey tourist photo for posterity:

Okay, so these ones are pretty cheesey, too – but cute!

I can tell the boys are starting to lose patience in being dragged around the old city, but Beloved wants to make one quick stop at the l’Hotel Dieu, a museum run by Augustinian nuns within a working hospital, before we stop for lunch. I was hoping the boys could stand at least a little bit of cultural indoctrination, but am fearful of what kind of behaviour we might encounter with tired, hot, cranky boys inside, of all places, a monastery. We are wandering down from the Citadel back into the city walls when a perfectly lovely park appears in our path like an oasis. I nearly fall down with joy and gratitude, and the boys and I stop to play for an hour while Beloved makes his way down to the museum unencumbered.

The Parc Esplanade is truly a gift, a full park nestled up against the old city walls. We swing, we climb, we play with the children of other exhaustedly grateful tourists, and we even make our way up on to the old walls themselves to run on the grass-topped ramparts for a few spectacular minutes.

The hill that rises up the left side of the photo leads up to the old city walls, which you can just barely make out. The buildings you see are all outside the old city walls.

Now I get it. This is the Quebec City that people have raved to me about. Amazing…

Continue reading Sketches of Quebec City with Part Four, Tristan’s Perspective.

In 1759, the British and French forces fought the a definitive battle on the Plains of Abraham. Early on a humid morning in 2006, I was just grateful for a place to let the boys wander safely and explore the world at their own pace for a while. Wide open spaces, sweeping vistas down the escarpment to the river, and sporadic canons – not the worst way to pass a bit of time.

Finally, with at least some of the boys’ energy burned off, we manage to make our way into the walled old city. I finally understand why people rave about Quebec City. The cobblestone streets are narrow, winding, unpredictable. Centuries-old buildings crowd together, leaning into each other for support. Everything is an arm’s reach from everything else. Windowboxes adorn every window, and containers overflowing with flowers stand sentry at most doorways. It is like something out of a fairytale.

We wander near the Chateau Frontenac, and make our way down to lower town on the funicular, a 127 year old elevatorish device with a panoramic view that descends the side of the escarpment at a 45 degree angle. It is, we are told, the only funicular of this kind in Canada. The boys and I discover ‘funicular’ is a funny word to say, especially if you say it out loud, several times in a row.

Continue reading Sketches of Quebec City with Part Three.

I’m never going to get around to writing the epic post that sums up our sojourn in la Belle Province, so I’ve decided to cover it in a series of vignettes instead. I’ll try to post them over the course of the next couple of days.

We made, I decided in the end, a tactical error in choosing a Holiday Inn in downtown Quebec City over a more picturesque inn in the old city. For those of you who have never been there, the old city is an 18th century walled city perched atop an escarpment, looking down on the St Lawrence river. Our hotel is in the commercial district, a twenty minute walk from the old city. Twenty minutes seemed entirely accessible when making the booking through the Quebec tourism website, but a lot less so when Simon, Tristan and I set off on a wander shortly after arriving in Quebec City. Beloved, here to do research for his upcoming course in Quebec Art, has set off in the other direction toward the Musee des Augustins de l’Hopital General.

We are in no particular hurry, and set off without a specific destination in mind. Many of the tiny streets are only wide enough for a single car to pass, and the buildings crowd the street on either side. We wander down what seems to be a main street, and my stomach is tense trying to herd my wandering nomads through the pedestrians and away from the heavy traffic. Quebec has just passed a bylaw similar to the one that prohibits smoking in public spaces in Ontario, and the sidewalks are thick with cigarette smoke and loitering displaced smokers. The skies are heavy and threatening rain, and I’m not incredibly impressed with this first taste of a city that everybody raved enthusiastically about before our departure.

Then again, it could be that I’m a little cranky from the long drive (we sat on the highway for more than an hour while an accident was cleared away less than 700 metres ahead of us) or from the greasy lunch of pogos and french fries at the Bigfoot Madrid gas station, buffet, monster truck zone and plastic dinosaur exhibition (talk about brand confusion) a few hours ago.

I’m idly hoping to stumble across a mall, or a department store, where we can find – of all things – a magic wand for Simon. He found a piece of black tubing broken off another toy at Nancy’s place, and has fixated on it as his ‘magic wand’. Unfortunately, the treasured magic wand went missing somewhere in transit and Simon the Magnificent is apparently powerless without it.

We walk a scant two blocks from the hotel, and I’m beginning to realize we’re never going to make it as far as the old city, when I see a shop window with a lovely display of toys in it. We walk along, and the next two windows are similarly decorated. Hardly able to believe our luck, we pull open the doors to the largest, nicest toy store I’ve ever seen. Not only do we find magic wands, but we find – gasp! – train tables, and a full-sized train that is sadly only run on weekends. Simon busies himself with a doll house, Tristan settles in at the train table, and I stand guard nearby, gazing about with wonderous relief.

Dinner an hour later is a comedy of preschool shenanigans, funny to the few young men sitting at the bar in the otherwise empty (thankfully) small restaurant we have chosen to subject to the boys’ antics. The hotel guide recommended it for pizza, paninis and burgers, which seemed a perfect family-style combination. In retrospect, the raised eyebrows of the welcoming server when I ask for a table for two adults and two children should have served as a more clear warning that this is not a child-friendly establishment. It is not unfriendly, exactly, but moreso unprepared for the hurricane that is my boys.

They refuse to sit still, slipping in and out of their seats and under the table. They tug the tablecloth and rattle the silverware. Simon insists on holding his own glass tumbler, and while Beloved and I focus our attention on him, Tristan elbows his own full glass all over the table. After carefully mopping up the ensuing puddle, with a look between amusement and pity the server brings over a box of pencil crayons and markers and earns a tip half the price of the meal. The young guys watching with amusement at the bar chuckle when I reach across the table and gulp half of Beloved’s pint in one weary pull.

The boys refuse to eat, so I eat half of their incredible club sandwich (made with real turkey – exquisite!) after downing my own sicilian pizza. Beloved raves about his reuben panini and the belgian sauce (garlic mayonnaise) that accompanies his home-cut french fries. It is a delicious meal, what I taste of it in my hurry to swallow it down and get the hell out of there, and I am grateful to the patient kindness of the server and his cronies.

By the time we make it back to the hotel, the boys are clamouring for a swim in the hotel pool. I am disappointed to find that it is so deep in the shallow end that Tristan can barely touch bottom, and I have to hold Simon in my arms. By the time we make it back upstairs, I am overtired, overfull, and rather cranky. We all fall asleep to Regis Philbon and America’s Got Talent, having never even made it near the old city.

Continue reading Sketches of Quebec City with Part Two.

We’re in the midst of planning our first real family vacation. We’ve done plenty of road trips, staying with friends or relatives for a weekend, and of course we had a few camping trips with varying degrees of luxury. But this will be the first time we go to a city where we know no one, just for the heck of it, and actually stay in a hotel. Believe it or not, it’ll be the first time since our honeymoon (in Paris, bien sûr) seven years ago that Beloved and I have stayed in a hotel together.

We’re going to Québec City for three whole days, and I can’t wait! We’re also going to Montreal for a day, where we have an all-day playdate inked in with my frequent co-conspirator and favourite blogger, Nancy and her boys.

Beloved is teaching a course on Québec art this fall, so he’s doing a gallery and museum tour to familiarize himself with the subject matter. While I would absolutely love to tag along with him, I’m thinking that preschoolers and art galleries do not make a good mix. We’ll probably do something as a family early in the day, and either I’ll retreat to the hotel for Simon’s (ha!) nap, or I’ll drop Beloved off at a museum and drive big loops around the city for a couple of hours while the boys snooze in the back.

Planning a vacation with preschoolers is not exactly the same as planning a trip for yourself, I’m learning. When I went to Europe in 1995, I travelled by myself and chose places to stay based first on the cool factor, then on the safety factor, and finally on the cost factor. If I were travelling to Québec without the kids, I’d stay in the old city in a little B&B with period furniture and lots of charm and character. Where we’re actually booked is a Holiday Inn about a 20-minute walk outside the old city, with a pool, wi-fi, cable and lots of Internet reviews that say things like “family friendly” and “boring but serviceable”. Because Simon the Terrible and period furniture just don’t seem to be a good mix, ya know?

I’ve never been to Québec City before, and I’m looking forward to it. Everyone who has been there tells me it’s the closest thing to a European city this side of the pond. I absolutely love the idea of letting the boys run rampant on the Plains of Abraham, and I think there will be more than enough to keep everyone busy for a few days. And who knows, I might even get to practice my French.

Any thoughts on vacationing with preschoolers? You guys were positively inspiring on the whole “what should we eat when camping” issue, so now I’m not making a move without consulting you first!

So you’ve been waiting for the update, right? You saw the forecast for rain, rain and more rain. You knew I was in a crappy mood heading out. You’re itching to hear how it went, right?

Three words: Best. Camping. Ever.

Here, for your reading pleasure, an essay on how to achieve the perfect camping weekend, by Dani.

When you are making a reservation for the KOA Free Camping Weekend, and they tell you that they don’t have any of these cabins left, but oooh, look at that, the villa is available, DO tell them yes, you will be happy to take the villa for the weekend, instead of the one-room, drafty, unserviced cabin. Because THIS little white cottage is the “villa”:

(DO notice that it’s right beside the playground, with a full kitchen, full bath including tub, sunken living room with gas fireplace, heated and air conditioned, with one bedroom, plus an alcove with TV and VCR and double futon, and two futons in the living room, and comes equipped with linens and plates and cups and pots and pans and cutlery – all this for $130 a night, one of which are FREE!!, in the most lovely campground I’ve ever visited.)

DON’T listen to the weather forecast with growing angst for a week before you leave. The forecast will call for biblical amounts of rainfall, and your friends back home will report a dreary grey weekend. But you will have discovered a magical micro-climate bubble where the rain peters out when you arrive, makes a sprinkling appearance the first night around the campfire, and then retreats completely until you are in the car on the way home. In fact, the skies will clear and the temperatures be so moderate that you will make time to enjoy the pool and outdoor hottub at the campground.

DO NOT try to light a campfire (for aesthetic purposes only, having used the gas range to cook dinner) using a dozen pilfered 1000 Islands Visitors Guides and two rolls of toilet paper. DO learn that the expression “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is in fact not true.

DO take advantage of the campground’s ice cream social. DO NOT eat the chocolate reddi-whip in a can. (Beloved and the boys have a different opinion on this one but it is, in th end, my blog and my opinion that prevail.)

DO NOT be too disappointed if the boys choose to ignore your lecture on how to perfect the balance between the roasted and the burnt marshmallow and instead prefer to eat their marshmallows raw, straight out of the bag.

DO be kind and let your husband have the bed to share with your eldest son when the three of them fall asleep together while reading books before bedtime, leaving you to sleep on one of the futons in the living room. DO NOT assume you will get a better night’s sleep and think you will be able to sleep through your brother’s snores, rattling the entire cottage from the alcove.

DO feel free to get out and take a walk when it is 7:15 in the morning and you’ve already been up for over an hour and find the whole family crawling the walls.

DO NOT feel obliged to hurry. DO take the time to examine every stone, culvert, rock outcrop and interesting weed along the way. DO NOT drink three cups of coffee before you go off wandering away from civilization and bathrooms.

DO take some time to be touristy, and do something fun like taking a boat tour of the 1000 Islands with your parents and your kids, even if you have done it many times before.

DO be patient when your two-year-old is more interested in rearranging the chairs on the deck than in the islands and other boats. DO be glad you chose to travel in the off-season.

DO NOT worry if the ‘rain and twelve degrees’ forecast made you leave your bathing suit at home. DO be grateful for the discount stores in small towns where you can buy absolutely anything for practically nothing.

DO NOT fear lasting damage when you enter the pool enclosure with your four-year old and realize as you stand up from taking off your shoes that you don’t know where he is, and you find him struggling to get to the surface in the five foot deep pool that he has jumped into, thinking the water shallow. DO NOT spend too much time wondering ‘what if’. DO be grateful when it doesn’t seem to faze him, even though you are sure you will never forget the look on his face as his eyes locked on yours in the heartbeat before you jumped into the pool. DO NOT consider throttling him yourself when he makes the exact same mistake less than 20 minutes later in another pool. DO think the $50 swimming lessons have paid for themselves a thousand times over.

DO spend lots of time with your family. DO marvel at how your eldest son is far more patient with his 18 month old nephew than with his two year old brother.

DO bring along a fun toy like this ‘jumpoline’ (thanks to Andrea, who recommended it way back when I was looking for gift ideas for Simon’s birthday) and dollar-store toys like bubbles and ring toss and hundreds of stickers.

DO NOT be surprised that you can survive as well without the Internet as the boys can survive without TV. DO NOT take this message to heart.

DO let the rules lapse a little bit. DO NOT be alarmed when Simon absolutely refuses to sleep in the pack’n’play. DO have confidence that the boys will eventually fall asleep, even if it takes more than an hour. DO think they look even more angelic sleeping together than they do when sleeping separately.

DO play Texas Hold ‘Em with your folks and your brother well into the night. DO NOT chase the inside straight. DO admire your mother’s poker playing skills.

DO eat yummy meals like sloppy joes, curly hot-dog flowers, and steak and chicken brochettes on a pita with tzatziki. DO be grateful to bloggy friends for great suggestions. DO NOT stick to your usual food rules and DO consume vast quantities of chips, peanuts, and other garbage. DO NOT leave the smores on the fire for more than a minute or two, because carbonized graham crackers are really not that appetizing.

DO NOT let the worst cold of the year get you down. DO be glad that if you are sick, at least your mommy is around to feel sympathetic.

DO make the trip home fun by stopping at the Skydeck tower to look out at the 1000 Islands from 400m above the river.

DO NOT be surprised when the boys have much more fun running in circles around the sky deck than actually looking out of the tower.

DO take yet another moment to marvel at the weather when you pull out onto the highway and the rain starts pouring down. DO be grateful for a weekend of perfect camping weather.

DO decide to make this perfect little cottage your favourite family ‘camping’ destination. DO NOT feel guilty for having spent a weekend camping without actually unrolling your sleeping bag or spending a single night sleeping on the ground or picking a single speck of dirt out of your food. DO feel like you are roughing it when some campfire ash drifts into your beer and you decide to drink it anyway. DO believe that traditional camping is overrated.

DO be glad to spend Mother’s Day with the people you love most in the world.

I need you, bloggy friends! I need your ideas, and I need your good wishes.

First, your ideas: we are going camping this weekend. It’s our second annual free camping weekend, and this year my brother, sister-in-law, 18 month old nephew, and the four of us will be joined by my mother and father – all in a one-bedroom cottage. One of those adventures that you just know we’ll be talking about for years, whether with affection or rolling eyes.

The weather forecast is not so good. Probability of rain varies from 80% to 60% to 100% over the three days we’ll be there. Yikes! (If we are ever having a drought of biblical proportions, just let me know and I’ll go camping. I don’t think I’ve gone camping once in the past 10 years that it hasn’t rained. The smell of rain in the morning invariably reminds me of camping.)

But what I really need, my bloggy friends, is ideas on what to eat. I’m not much of a camping person (thus the whole ‘camping in a cabin’ thing) and you know I’m not much of a cook. So besides the de riguer hot-dogs burnt on an open flame, can you give me any easy to buy for, store, prepare and clean-up-after camping food ideas? Elsewise we’re going to be eating a lot of Fritos this weekend, with maybe some apples thrown in for balance. And, of course, enough marshmallows that it will be another full year before I can even consider looking at them, let along eating them, again. And yes Marla, I did google camp recipes, but last time I tried a recipe off the Internet we ended up ordering pizza for dinner anyway.

And the other thing? At about 8:30 this morning, I’m going to be subjecting myself to yet another French test. This one is for all the marbles. Souhaitez-moi bien, s’il vous plait! (Or, you can wish me ‘merde’ if you must. It’s tradition, I know, but I still don’t get it.)

Bonus conversation:

Tristan: Girls suck and boys rock!

Me (sweetly): You know, Tristan, mommy is a girl.

Tristan: Well then YOU SUCK!

So much for mommy’s boy…

I’m traveling today, flying across the country to the west coast. And yet, I typed this up ahead of time so you’d have something to read today. Wasn’t that nice of me?

I fly infrequently enough that I still love it, still find it a bit of a thrill. It’s been about a year since the last time I was on a plane, and that was the rather mundane 45 minute flight from Ottawa to Toronto – achieve altitude, fly at cruising altitude for three minutes, begin descent. Ottawa to Vancouver is a more substantial 5 hour flight, with mountains no less. Mountains rock!

One of my favourite parts of traveling is watching the other travelers, especially at the airport. I’ve always been a bit of a people watcher, but something about being in transit makes me even more curious about the people around me. Where are they going? Where are they coming from? Are they nervous? Excited? Bored? What is their story, their greatest achievement, their biggest dissapointment?

If you like snapshots of other people’s lives, you’ll love Overheard In New York. It’s just a handful of people recording snippets of conversation overheard in NYC. Strangely compelling and addictive!

Tristan had no idea what we were up to. We had parked a ways from the train museum in St Thomas, and told him that we were going to see some trains.
We rounded the corner, and we could see the trains off in the distance, across a little park. We started hiking that way, a motley group of six adults and four boys ranging in age from 8 months to 5 1/2 years. Tristan, having no idea about the fact that he was about to meet Thomas the Tank engine face to face, was excited just to be near the train and couldn’t wait to get closer.
We adults could see the trains in the distance a little bit better, and when one of them started to move, we could see Thomas being pulled at the very end of it. At first, Tristan didn’t understand what he was looking, but this was his expression when Beloved pointed Thomas out to him.

It took Tristan a minute to process what he was seeing, and then he took off at a run after Thomas, leaving us howling with laughter.

After a minute, we realized that Tristan didn’t know what we had planned for the morning, and only knew that he had just brushed “this close” to his idol, only to have Thomas chug off into the distance without him, leaving Tristan staring forlornly after the retreating train, so we quickly explained the plans for the rest of the day.

They had a lot of booths and tables set up inside the museum. Everything from temporary tatoos (we all got one, except for Beloved – and Tristan and Simon both are fascinated by the Thomas tatoo on my bicep, even though they each have one of their own) to colouring tables and crafts, to (of course) train tables.

There were scads of people there, but it was so well run that it never felt uncomfortably crowded. After we played for a while, it was time for us to take our ride on Thomas. Before we got on the train, Tristan had a chance to get a good look at Thomas.

My sister-in-law had called me the week before our trip and told me that she got a good deal on a conductor’s hat for my 8 month old nephew, so I sent my mother off in search of matching ones for my boys. All she could find were the expensive name-brand ones, which I at first balked at, but she said she wanted a nice picture of her three grandsons together with their conductor’s hats. This is about as close as we came to success with that photo op.

The train ride itself was short and sweet. We traveled maybe 10 kilometers, over a spectacular high trestle that I’ve driven under many a time, but never had the chance to ride over (if you know St Thomas, you know the one I mean.) It was just long enough to satisfy the boys without making them too antsy. The passenger coaches were beautiful old Pullman cars. The one we were riding in was built in 1919.

After the train ride, you could stand on a little platform and have your picture taken with Thomas, but the queues were (not surprisingly) huge and I had just spent the entire train ride with Simon jostling against my bladder, which although sweetly reminiscent of my pregnancy days, was in the end rather unpleasant, so I was more interested in finding the bathroom than standing in another queue.

After we examined the gift shop and other displays, I happened to look out and see the queue had dwindled to almost nothing for the Thomas pictures, so I hurried back inside to round up my gang for a photo. I got them onto the pedestal just as the conductor started calling the all-clear for the train to pull out of the station, and

managed to get these well-composed pictures of my professional models as the train pulled away.

Luckily, the paid photographer’s timing was much better than mine, and he caught a really cute pose that I happily handed over my Visa card in order to aquire in 5×7 glossy format – and a keychain, too. I’ll scan them in later, I promise!

As morning stretched into early afternoon, we bid our farewells to Thomas. We loaded the boys into the car, had a hectic lunch at Wendy’s with every 3 through 5 year old in southerin Ontario running rampant through the dining room, and spent a blissfully peaceful two hours driving in gentle loops of the backcountry highways on the north shore of Lake Erie.

My only regret about the whole weekend is that we had hoped to bring the boys to Storybook Gardens in London on Sunday, but it was pouring rain when we left Port Stanley. That, and the pollution levels were too high to allow us to play in the water on the beach. The whole adventure was a wonderful success, and I’ll just gloss over the details of the accompanying cottage adventure with my brother and sister-in-law in Port Stanley and the trip the next day to the Railway and Streetcar Museum (where we rode an authentic 1893 TTC streetcar, and two other retired streetcars) and our stop on the way home at the Big Apple off the 401.

I’m jealous of those of you who can do this regularly! This seems to have been only the second time Thomas has come to Canada, and the volunteers were telling us it was an event three years in the making. I’d do it again in an instant!