P-DAY for us...

We have been very good missionaries lately - driving back & forth from Montreal to Cornwall, working hard & not getting any Preparation Days. (for those who don't know, all missionaries get one day a week as a Preparation Day - or P-Day. They use that day to do laundry, write letters, email home and read emails, etc. Since we really haven't given ourselves any P-Days, the mission president said for us to take Thursday & Friday this week & go to Quebec so that we could see it. Since we'll be serving on the far west end of the mission, we might not get a chance to see Quebec - on the far east end. So, we took him up on it! It was a wonderful two days! We booked a hotel right down in the heart of the Old City (Quebec Vieux). Parking is a REAL premium there, so we picked a hotel that had parking.The hallways are very narrow, and none of the floors are on the same level, either there's a slope up or down or an actual step. But the rooms are lovely.We checked in and then began our walking adventure! We ended up walking for about 8 and 1/2 hours straight! There is a lot to see and you just have to walk to see it! I'll never be able to write how wonderfully quaint and so like France it is. There are churches and statues everywhere. And not just small churches either! The streets in this old part of the city are cobblestone, but some are very fancy. As we were walking to our first part of the old city, we spotted this wonderfully huge fresco painted on the wall of a building. It looks like several buildings and it is sort of historical, as the painter has painted famous figures in history into the painting. It is 5 stories high. We continued up into the old city - it is the oldest walled city in North America they say.(The metal fence barriers are up because they next day they were having some Canadian Gran Prix bicycle race) - but we still got to go around them and got to see everything. First stop was the Chateau Frontenac. An interesting thing to note in Canada is that Hotels are called Chateaus - and Halls of Government are called Hotels. So, Hotel de Parliament is the Hall of Parliament and Hotel de Ville is City Hall. But Chateau Frontenac is really a Hotel... these crazy french people!Thank heaven most of the signs are written in both French AND English. This is a huge hotel - built in seven stages, starting in 1892. It was even used by Winston Churchill, FDR, and the Canadian Prime Minister as a meeting place to plan the D-Day invasion of Normandy. There is a huge statue just outside dedicated to Samuel Champlain who discovered the St. Lawrence Seaway and founded Quebec. The hotel is up on top of a hill... (of course, since we were walking, EVERYTHING was up on a hill !) and there is a very wide & long boardwalk around it which offers a spectacular view of the St.Lawrence. No wonder they even used it as a lookout and positioned cannons around it's base to protect Quebec.

They are currently working on the top of the hotel. Apparently the copper roofs must be replaced every 100 years, so they are putting on a new copper roof on the tallest tower.
We felt very lucky to have a tour of the inside. Our tour guide, dressed in 1890's garb, told us that this is the last month they are going to have the tours. As of Oct.1 they are cancelling the tours altogether! In one room - called the Salle Rose (the pink room) they used it as a ladies' room (since the men had their smoking room downstairs) for tea, then as a ballroom for dances. The couch I am sitting on is called the Jealousy couch - since all the single women waiting for a dance would sit there & be jealous of all those girls who were dancing! This was also FDR's favorite room. Inside there is a small mock-up of the hotel.

Since the hotel was built in stages, when they would join the stages together, often the floors did not match up. Here's a great example of rooms on the 3rd floor.... some are on the even part of the floor, some are a couple of steps up, or a couple of steps down. It really is a magnificient structure! Next we headed up another huge hill & walked almost all the way around it. It is on a huge landscaped expanse of ground that is known as the Plains of Abraham. This is where The Citadel is located. It is still a working military base. You can still see the cannons from the early 1900's and then they still have the changing of the guard. And... if they weren't going to be having the huge bicycle race the next day, it would have all been open - but alas, it was not open and so after all the climbing and walking, we did not get to go in or see the changing of the guard, but if we had.... it would have looked like this:We DID get to see the magnificent view from way up there tho:By now my feet were hurting, the knees were starting to tighten up, but we were only about half way through our day. Next post we'll keep going.