travel dates: July, 2024
One of the reasons we stayed at KOAs for both of our Quebec stops was the promise of bilingual staffs, and we did indeed get this as promised. But when we checked in to the Quebec City KOA, Dave decided to try out a (very) little bit of French and bravely announced, “J’ai une réservation” at the front desk. The woman asked for his name in French, which he managed to understand and answer. But then she asked another question that he was completely lost with and she had to repeat it in English. That sorted, she politely asked, “do you want me to switch back to French?” at which point Dave assured her that they’d already exhausted his knowledge of French and should carry on in English.
This was pretty standard for our French-speaking experiments in Quebec. People were very friendly and encouraging about our attempts but also very good at reading the situation and speaking English when we needed them to (nearly always, despite my months of Duolingo). I’ve probably already written this in another post, but, basically we found that people working in touristy areas and sites were nearly always bilingual. So we were glad we had tried to learn a little French for politeness/general self-improvement, but language barriers were not a problem anywhere we went. Someday we’d like to return to Quebec and get out of the cities more, and then I imagine things will be a little different in that regard.
So! In this post I’ll do a quick review of our stay at the Quebec City KOA and then talk a little about transportation and parking logistics for Quebec City.
We had a great stay here and found it the perfect base for our Quebec City touring. The campground had really nice facilities (pool with waterslide! lovely outdoor areas with communal fire pit! nice bath houses!) but we were mostly just there to sleep, so we didn’t get to take advantage of that. Also there were these fun little boxes you could stay in:
Somewhat oddly, the jump pillow and playground were right by the main road, separated from most of the sites and other public areas. We were in the large lower area, near a big rec hall and a smaller play area:
Sites were fairly standard–mostly pull-throughs in a grid–but nice:
As always with urban camping, getting in and out of the city is a big consideration. And consider it we did…but all for nought because we hadn’t counted on the ferry worker strike that was happening while we were there. There was also a big music festival that we didn’t know about (featuring Post Malone! people were pretty excited), and apparently (according the KOA staff) this timing was deliberate so the strike would be as disruptive as possible. I’m all for labor and I hope things worked out well for the ferry workers, but it did mean we had to do some scrambling.
So. In regular times, you can drive a few minutes to park and then take the ferry across the St. Lawrence River from Levis to the old town in Quebec City. This sounds lovely. Maybe someday we’ll get to try it! The campground also runs an inexpensive shuttle into the city, which we considered taking…but it needed to be reserved the night before and between that and needing to stick to their schedule we decided we were better off just driving in.
Turns out this worked fine! Driving and parking in Quebec City was not nearly as daunting as in Montreal or Toronto, although it did make for a great deal of walking (but taking the ferry probably would have as well). There are a number of paid (surface) lots along the edge of the historic district, and we found plenty of availability in one on Rue Abraham Martin.
This was less than a 30 minute drive from the campground (luckily for us, we were always going against music festival traffic, so it was never bad except once when we tried to drive around the area local to the campground in the evening) and very affordable (a quick google search is showing me $18CAD for all day parking). The downside here is that it’s a bit of a hike to the tourist stuff (around a 20 minute walk to Dufferin Terrace, for example) and a pretty hilly one, so it would not work well for anyone with mobility challenges and it’s not a lot of fun at the end of a long day for anyone. I’m sure it’s possible to use buses, taxis, or ride shares to get closer to the action, though.
Important caveat to my “driving in Quebec City isn’t so bad” advice: this applies to getting in and out of the city and to the areas outside the city center: I definitely wouldn’t have been happy if we had tried to take our big old van anywhere in the historic district. We saw a lot of people trying to navigate those streets, and it did not look fun (it is possible; a lot of bigger vehicles manage it. I just wouldn’t want to try it myself).
Alright! Now I’ve finally wrapped up our stay in Canada from 2024! Next up we make it back to the US and spend a few days in New England! Someday I’ll blog about last summer’s trip, too!
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