Saturday 8-5 was a good day for travel, no rain and mostly sunny, and we drove the 8+ hours to Quebec City for a short stay. Much of the trip along Rte. 138 was adjacent to the St. Lawrence River, and so very scenic and open with small towns and some denser population than eastern CA. On this drive we would take our last ferry ride of the trip in the car with the camper. A bit short of halfway to Quebec City on Hwy 138, the road ends at the St. Jean River and starts up again on the far bank after a short, free ferry ride across. It was a pretty efficient operation with 2 ferries running. From waiting to load to debarking on the far shore was roughly 37 minutes, much shorter than driving around to a bridge 300 km, round-trip, away.
We arrived at the Quebec City KOA campground about 10-minutes outside Quebec City around 6-6:30pm, in plenty of time to set up camp and get a fire going before darkness falls. We had a nice pull-through site but the folks at this campground, especially our neighbors, were not as friendly. No one that passed by our site said hello until we said it first or tried to speak with us or stopped to introduce themselves. It was a different dynamic than eastern Canada. Mary did meet some guys (Blair and Peter) while doing the dishes that we had a longer interaction with on Saturday.
Sunday we spent in Old Town Quebec, across the St Lawrence River from where we were in Levis. We drove to the ferry terminal and parked there for a fraction of what it would cost to park in the city. From the docks we headed up the hill on foot, foregoing the funicular trolley from the lower city to the upper city at Fort St Lewis, and arrived up top at the Fort Museum, the start of “Old Town”. We were making our way towards the Fountain of Tourny, a center of old town from which we could explore and stumbled into a kind of Renaissance Faire celebrating New France. This area of Canada was a French possession for many years and this festival celebrates that life and culture. There were more than 50 people in costume, both workers and patrons, nobility, fur traders, musicians, scholars, ‘normal folk’, etc. There were vendors and food sellers and most importantly a beer garden and alcohol sellers, and free folk music, Acadian, French, Irish and English. I had some bison and boar meat (sausages) on a stick that were very tasty and Mary had a vegetarian pie. We spent several hours at the New France festival before taking to foot again to check out the Parliament Building across the park from the faire. They weren’t giving tours but we were able to walk the grounds and admire the architecture and statuary of many great leaders of Quebec and Canada in recesses of the building’s front facing.
I wanted to walk on the city wall that ran behind the faire location, and we set off towards the Citadel which was less than a half a mile south of Parliament. There was no access to the city walls that we could find but there was access to a boardwalk/trail along the south side of the Citadel that ran the length of the fortification and beyond to Fort St Louis, about a kilometer’s length away. The boardwalk was covered in shade for most of its distance by trees running along the boardwalk’s riverside and the height and angle of the sun to the battlements 60’ above us on the opposite side of the boardwalk. It was a quiet, easy stroll with plenty of access to views of the river and the traffic of commercial and pleasure boats using the waterway. We hiked down the heights to the lower city again to walk on Notre Dame Street, the oldest commercial street in north America, from the late 16th century to today, more than 400 years. Of course, we conducted commerce while there. Many of the buildings look like medieval structures or made from the stones of old city walls perhaps. We did have to stop and get dinner at one of the quaint pubs/bistros just off Notre Dame St. The food and cider was good, though the seafood platter I ordered came out as a charcuterie board presentation rather than a hot plate of several different fish types. Other than that disappointment the atmosphere was great, and our location allowed for people watching, so it was a net good experience.
Post dinner, literally leaving the restaurant, we ran into the 2 guys Mary met doing the dishes the prior evening. Peter, who’s deaf and can’t speak, and Blair, his friend and traveling companion who’s Peter’s interpreter also. We started a conversation and kept it going for a while as we were all taking the 8:30 ferry back to Levis and the KOA. Mary and didn’t recall any sign language we learned over the course of our lives, but Peter was very good at getting his message across using charades/pantomime gestures when Blair was not around to translate for us. They were both from Ontario, north of Toronto, and out here camping for a few weeks and were on their homeward leg now, as were we. We had a lively conversation on the ferry about a wide range of subjects, but mostly about each of our travel adventures in Canada. We exchanged cell numbers to send each other pictures and words from the last leg of each of our journeys. It was too late when we arrived back to camp for a fire and more conversation, which turned out to be a good thing since we were spent by the time we got back to camp.
The road home……
Monday was a travel day with no real destination in mind other than heading west towards home and stopping somewhere near Toronto for the night. We got to enjoy some coffee (actually Mary drinks the coffee) with Peter and Blair before packing up the camper. We were done camping after leaving Quebec City as our desire to get home was growing. There were several personal issues plaguing us and they would be more easily and quickly dealt with at home. Also setting the camper up and down for a 1-night stay is more of a hassle than helpful. We had targeted Belleville, ON, on the north shore of Lake Ontario but the traffic from construction and weather along our route added at least 2-hours to what should have been a 6-hour drive. Since it was getting to be evening/dinner time we stopped short of Belleville and overnighted in Kingston, also on the north shore of Lake Ontario about 100km east of Belleville. We got a room for the night and once again enjoyed air conditioning and free showers.
Tuesday morning, we had more of a plan, to get to Ann Arbor for tonight’s rest stop. We left early (for us – before 10am) since we had a solid 8 hours drive today and a border crossing to negotiate. The border crossing could have gone smoother if we had made the correct choice of waiting lines to get into. But we didn’t. It looked like there was another option and we took it but it was the commercial truck lanes. There was no way to turn around or get back to the passenger car lanes, so we got in line like a big rig. When we got to the custom’s officer, we got the requisite scowls reserved for idiots that can’t read signs properly, though in our defense, the lanes were not clearly posted or we would not have made an error. It was odd though when they asked who I was traveling with after giving them our passports. I had to explicitly explain that, yes, Mary BrowningSmith was my wife. It was no big deal though and we got processed through without an arrest or cavity search, for which we are eternally grateful. However, there was a “payment” coming our way.
About 6-7 miles outside of Ann Arbor the camper started riding really roughly, lots of vibrating and noise. I changed lanes to the middle lane and then the right lane but the noise and vibrations were still there and getting louder, so it wasn’t the road. Luckily an exit came up quickly and we were able to get off the highway and pull into a gas station only a couple dozen yards off the exit ramp. We jumped out to look at WTF? At first it looked fine but at closer study we discovered the left side camper tire was shedding rubber! About 40%-50% of the tread had come off and we could clearly see the inner tube, but it had not yet ruptured. It was a 10-15 minute job to change the tire and get back on the road, but it was another slap in the face by the Universe and it’s sick sense of humor. Not long after, we arrived at our hotel in Ann Arbor, in what looked like a questionable part of town, and decided to eat in, ordering food for delivery to our hotel, eliminating the need to venture outside. At this point we were less interested in exploring Ann Arbor than in relaxing and unwinding after a day of travel.
Wednesday, we left early again with the intention of making Palatine by evening time. Mary was driving as we departed Ann Arbor. We had decided to drop down OH 23 south to the Toledo area and then take 80/90 across OH and IN to IL. The construction and traffic delays, for once, were hardly a factor at all compared to how the roads out of Ann Arbor West and SW showed on the Maps App. As it happened, only a few miles outside of Sturgis, IN, we heard and felt a loud “bang” noise signifying a blowout. She steered us on to the “country shoulder” meaning a shoulder not wide enough to hold a normal vehicle and be a safe distance from the roadway.
We got out and checked the right-side camper trailer and it was the same issue, tread falling off and this tire was flat having blown out as we thought we heard. We had planned for this, having brought two spares for the camper, more for the rough roads we expected in Newfoundland and Labrador, not Lambertville, Michigan! Today’s problem was that the 2nd spare was inside the folded down and stored camper. I had to reposition the Jeep and camper on the shoulder to allow room to put up the camper to a degree to get the 2nd spare, and to be able to set the camper jack on the blacktopped part of the shoulder rather than on the grassy part of the shoulder. We got the camper raised enough for me to get in there and retrieve the tire, and to retract the camper once more. Once that was done, it was again a 10-15 minute job to put the new tire on and the old in the camper and be ready to get back on the road. As I was changing the tire Mary recognized the feel of insects on her legs and glanced down to see we had parked in an ant colony. She looked at me kneeling by the camper and my back was full of ants. I didn’t really feel them but she was horrified and brushed them off to save us both.
We decided we had best not travel without a spare tire so Mary found a dealer 6 miles away in Sturgis, in the direction of Chicago, that could get a new tire today and mount it for us in a couple hours. We drove over to the shop and left one of the flattened spare tires for them to mount the new rubber on. We had an hour to kill and went across the street to Grandma’s Place, but they closed at 2pm, 5 minutes before we showed up. That left DQ as the only other “restaurant” in walking distance, so a fast-food meal while we waited for, what we hoped was, fast service at the tire shop. It was. When we returned, they were done and since we had our own rim, the bill was $30 less than quoted, which was a win for us on this trip home. Fed and back on the road, we were early enough coming around Chicago to avoid most of the rush hour traffic and arrived home just before 6pm om Wednesday, August 9th.
Two months to the day since we left for the Martimes adventure!
8,558 miles travelled in 61 days.
6 out of 10 provinces visited (8 of 12 if you count Labrador and Cape Breton as their own provinces, which the residents of these areas do).
1 new caliper, 2 flat tires and a new CO2/propane sensor/alarm to keep the vessels operable and a new computer.
Too much beer, cider and wine to count, along with a bottle of Basil Hayden Dark Rye, a bottle of Matusalem Rum, a flask of Poppa’s Pillar Rum, a flask of Pendelton 1910 Rye and several boxes of wine.
Thus ends this BrowningSmith tale of great adventure in the Canadian Maritimes.
Cool on the Blair and Peter acquaintance and the New France festival! Double tire trouble sucks but this would have been so much worse had you not been prepared!