Our hotel — Le Priori

At last we were ready to begin our next adventure to Quebec and beyond, but the trip from Seattle to Quebec City did have its issues. Not only did we start with an EARLY pickup at the house (4:30 am), but we had to get ourselves and our bikes squared away at the airport, and make sure Keenan was ready for his flight to Stockholm a few hours after our flight.

Mike was NOT pleased when we pulled out his new Kindle in the airport to do a bit of reading and discovered it was completely frozen. He tried researching the problem with his iPad, but none of the suggested solutions worked. It was looking like the Paperwhite was actually a Paperweight. Fortunately the iPad also had a kindle app on it, so books could still be read.

The real adventure started when we hit the Toronto airport. After exiting the plane, it was very unclear as to what direction we should walk to go through immigration and customs. We sort of followed the flow but had to ask staff people just to find out which way for connecting flights if you were arriving from the US. We also received no real direction as to what we were going to need to do to get our luggage through Canadian customs. We assumed, and even checked our assumption with someone in the airport, that we would have to get our checked luggage back and take it through customs with us, then turn it back in for the next flight. We entered one room with huge lines for Immigration, but then Mike noticed another sign indicating a different direction if you were continuing on another flight. We managed to make it through (supposedly) the proper immigration line. We guess we’ll find out when we try and leave Canada.
We then proceeded to the baggage carousel and waited and waited, but none of our bags appeared. We finally flagged down someone who worked there, who pointed us to someone else, who told us we didn’t need to pick up our checked bags and directed us to the next room for “Connections”. However, once we got there, we noticed other people were bringing large bags through and putting them on a conveyor once they had gone through customs. SO we checked with two more people who also told us we were fine. SO with our fingers crossed, we went through.

Unfortunately we then discovered that the path had taken us outside of the security zone, so we had to go through the security check again. We arrived to find a long line and overheard one staff member say that it was an hour and a half wait. Of course we did not have an hour and a half, as our plane was supposed to start boarding in 20 minutes. The line actually only took about a half hour, but we were still cutting it very close and had to sprint for our gate. We made it OK and got on our plane, still breathing a bit heavily. And here we thought that with a two hour layover we would have time for a leisurely dinner. Ha!

In Montreal we switched to a small turboprop plane. The gate for that was to hell and gone – we walked and walked, and found ourselves wandering through a deserted hall with no one else about (we were really starting to wonder at that point), but eventually we emerged in a room where they put the gates for the small planes you have to walk out to. No sign of the plane at first, but fairly soon it pulled in, they let us on, and away we went (actually, we sat on the tarmac for a half hour and THEN away we went). Our plane was late arriving and leaving because of bad weather, evidenced by the river of water washing across the tarmac.

Finally we landed in Quebec City. A cab quickly got us to our hotel (though Mike had to keep showing the cab driver the map of Quebec on the iPad so he could find the way). But once in, it felt SO good. The hotel (Le Priori) is a beautiful little boutique place on a quaint little street. We were tuckered, but the restaurant downstairs was still open, so we were able to start Quebec out right with a wonderful dinner. Mike had the “surf and turf” which consisted of BBQ’d octopus and sweetbreads. Tami had the “piglet cassoulet” with roast pork, foie gras sausage, and bacon in the beans. Perhaps she was the piglet for eating all of it?

Quebec City