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22 August 2015
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Saturday 22 August 2015--I have a breakfast date this morning with Sue, one of my oldest friends in Québec. She has suggested a waterfront restaurant outside St-Jean, but when I arrive there, I find it closed. Sue shows up a few minutes later, and suggests another place in St-Laurent, near where she lives. After breakfast, she takes me down to her cottage, one of a few dozen nestled on the wooded slope between the main road and the river. The view from the beach below is one few tourists ever see.

Here is my Quebec City story: I first visited in the early '80s with a girlfriend. For some reason we went in November, which is probably the quietest month of the year there, and for good reason--it's a dark, cold, and wet month, the warmth of summer and the color of autumn gone, the bright snows of winter yet to arrive. We were hanging out in Le Chantauteuil, a venerable boîte à chansons (which, as it happens, closed up just a couple of years ago). We fell into conversation with some locals, who then invited us to join them at a pub around the corner. It was the Bar Ste-Angèle, then owned by a Yorkshireman named David, who had opened it about ten years earlier. It was (and is) a small dark basement bar, meant to remind its proprietor of the pubs of his home county; it struck us as a quintessentially Québecois sort of place, but I hadn't been to Yorkshire then. Years later, I would visit David's local in his home town, and a lot of things suddenly made sense, like the horse brasses nailed to the ceiling beams.

A year or so after that first visit, I drove up to Quebec City one day on a whim, alone, in a borrowed car. I spent the evening in the Ste-A, and at closing, the bartenders, Paul and Doug, asked me where I was staying. I told them I was going to sleep in the car and go home in the morning. (Ah, youth.) They offered me their couch in exchange for a ride to their apartment in the suburbs, saving them taxi fare. When I left in the morning, they were still asleep.

Not long after that, I began my career as a charter bus driver. On my first trip to Quebec City, I popped into the Ste-A and said hello to Doug. In the following years, Québec became my number one destination, and I made a lot of friends in the Bar Ste-Angèle, including Doug, Sue, and Marc. Sue used to thrash me at backgammon regularly. Doug offered hospitality when I visited on my own, or with a girlfriend. Marc hosted social hours at the Ste-A for some of my bus groups. Time passes and things change...Doug married and raised his family near Ottawa, Sue went on to a career in medical IT, and most everyone else drifted off somewhere else. Marc managed the Ste-A until David finally sold it, but he remains my best friend in Quebec City. And so it is today that, after saying goodbye to Sue, I cross the bridge and drive the few short miles to Marc's apartment on the edge of the city.

Marc and I go shopping for supplies, and then have dinner at Les Maltcommodes, a brewpub he's been wanting to check out. (It's a big glitzy restaurant in a shopping mall, the sort of brewpub I'm not really fond of, but it was worth a try.) Then we retire to his place to nail down some travel plans over a few beers. We're away downriver in the morning.

Next


No Breakfast Here


Breakfast Here


Al Fresco


Waterfront Cottages


Choco Goes Swimming


Distant Towers


Sue & Choco At Home


Les Maltcommodes


Les Maltcommodes


Les Maltcommodes


Les Maltcommodes

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