It's Saturday July 31, 2010 at 8am. In two short hours my friend and I will be putting as much camping and photo gear as possible into my tiny VW Beetle, while still being able to see out all windows. Pointing the car towards the east we start our week long journey to a couple of the eastern provinces. First stop, Quebec City. Mr. GPS (I call him Mr bc somewhere along the way the directions will be ...um..."creative") has told us that it will take us 8.5 hours to get to our destination. Deciding that the 407 will be the better option we hop in the car and off we go, taking it straight to the end. Our first hurdle, an accident on the 401 Eastbound past Oshawa. In order to avoid this we take hwy 2 as far as possible before hooking on to the 401 again. So far we've lost an hour in doing this. That's ok we can still make the QC by late dinner. All's well in the world. Things continue to go smoothly until we notice something very strange about our drive...all the Service Centres seem to be closed. Yup, every single one is under construction (which apparently means torn down) along the eastern drive. Um....can we say poor planning? That's ok though, we are driving my "Deisel" VW Beetle so we still have another 500km before we need to fill.
Our Ontario part of the journey remains quiet and we continue to the border into Quebec. Now, my friend is all excited about getting pictures of all the Welcome signs as we hit each province, so with camera ready we reach the end of the 401 and hit Hwy 2. We are officially in Quebec, but lo and behold no welcome sign. huh. Maybe we missed it, you say? No we did not. There is no sign welcoming us Ontarians into La Belle Province. Nada. Ok no problem we'll get the one in New Brunswick.
The next hurdle is now upon us - traffic in Montreal. It's now 6pm and we are stuck in traffic to go into the tunnel so we can drive off the island. Oh, in case you didn't know Montreal is an island. It's surrounded by water on all four sides but you'd never know it unless you had to drive out on the north, east or south side of it. It's hardly noticeable when coming from the west. However, you will notice it if you take the tunnel in the east or the bridges on the north or south.
It takes us an hour to get off the island and start to hit decent speeds. As late evening approaches we decide to grab dinner on the fly so we stop in Drummodville for some St. Hubert. Back on the road about 40 minutes later we make our way to Quebec City. Finding a small little auberge that late at night in the middle of the old town was a little frustrating but we did it. Although now we had the joy of trying to find parking that was close and secure enough for us. Luckily we found a place that was pretty secure, cost us $8 and was within walking distance of the auberge.
We arrived at Auberge St-Louis at about 10pm, twelve hours after leaving Mississauga. Yes, that's right not 8.5 like Mr GPS said but 12. However, we did stop for lunch and dinner plus we had two hours total of traffic stops that brings us pretty close to 12 hours. So overall not too bad.
