Just like the previous day’s blog entry, this post is being written in early 2023 with no notes available to me. While somewhere in our stuff they might exist, I’m not feeling inclined to go on the hunt for them so I’m simply attacking these three missing days of our Canada trip in order to bring the photos out of the darkness of their electronic prison.

This is obviously not old town Quebec City anymore; we have left our luxury digs at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac hotel and are headed north. A note about that lodging: back in 2011, Caroline was working for a company whose clients included many hotel brands, including Fairmont. This afforded us the opportunity to get a vastly discounted rate on our King Suite, where we paid the minuscule amount of only $150 a night. While that is normally (and especially back in 2011) rather pricey for us, we just looked up what that room rents for today, and it comes in at $1500 a night yikes.

The gigantic Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is about 20 miles east of Quebec City and is an obvious first stop on our drive today. We had no idea that we’d stumble across another one of Canada’s national shrines today.

Even when it’s gray outside, the holy water in the church will be fresh and the environment magnificent, as this is something the Catholic Church gets right. A shrine or chapel to Saint Anne has been documented on the site since 1658, but today’s basilica was built in the 1920s after the previous one burnt down.

The basilica houses several relics from Saint Anne, including several inches of forearm bones. Miracles have been reported and in one area, a number of crutches and canes are on display, supposedly left by cured pilgrims.

According to the Catholic Church, the basilica receives over one million visitors annually, so there doesn’t seem to be any danger of this church being shut down.

This chunk of “Moon Dust” (ash-covered soft-ripened cheese from Duvillage 1860, later renamed La Pleine Lune) has stood out in our memories for all these years; we may forget details of the days spent in this French corner of Canada, but this cheese will never be forgotten. After our vacation, I tried to have it shipped to America, but to no avail (probably because it is made from unpasteurized milk), and now, a dozen years later, I’m looking anew, and still, nobody is shipping this cheese to the United States.

To someone unfamiliar with moose crossings, this certainly raises the old eyebrows, but so does the translation of the sign, “In case of intrusion, call 511.”

At the village of Les Éboulements, we stopped to take a quick self-guided tour of this flour mill called Le Moulin Seigneurial, which was built back in 1790. By the way, we have no problems with French street names, city names, or the speed in kilometers; the sense of being elsewhere is a delight.

At about 110 miles northeast of our starting point in the old town center, we decide that we’d better take advantage of a ferry that will take us across the St. Lawrence River which has seriously widened after leaving Quebec City. The ferry featured a small restaurant that allowed us to sample another version of poutine.

This patterning phenomenon is known in ancient cultures as water eating the sun.

I was just kidding about what I wrote above, but in Scotland, this form of baling hay is called rolling the kilt.

You might otherwise just pass through the village of Saint-André-de-Kamouraska in Quebec, but there’s something about this old house that captured our attention…maybe it’s just that we are on the south side of the St. Lawrence River.

When out on the road, Caroline has more than a few people back in Germany to whom she tries to write, so they find a surprise in their mailboxes from somewhere in North America. With a postmark from the village of Saint-Denis-De La Bouteillerie, we can hope they’ll be wondering just where our adventures took us.

Has anyone else ever wondered just how many beautiful sunsets they’ve seen during their lives?

If you thought we might take a break in the poutine dining regime, you’d be wrong, as we know that when we return to Arizona, there will be no more fries, cheese curds, and gravy, and with that in mind, we had a scrumptious dinner at Chez Ashton in Levis across from Quebec and likely drove to some point west of Montreal for our overnight stay.