Quebec City is located about 180 miles northeast of Montreal, a distance that could easily be done in three hours on the expressway between the two cities, but why take the expressway when there’s a trail on secondary roads given the touristy Chemin du Roy (King’s Way) through the towns along the Saint Lawrence? Why not make a full day out of the journey?

Well, I actually took the expressway the first half of the trip from Montreal to Trois-Rivieres, approximately the halfway point between Montreal and Quebec and the main city along the Saint Lawrence between the two. Trois-Rivieres has a number of minor sights including an old town with an Ursuline Convent and some other historic sites. I happened to hit it at the start of the weekend’s Ribfest on the bank of the Saint Lawrence near downtown, more Texas than Quebec. A more significant site is also along the river in Cap de La Madeleine, the twin city next to Trois Rivieres. The Basilica Notre-Dame-du-Cap and its next door older “petit sanctuarie” and gardens with statues depicting the stations of the cross are another one of Quebec’s major religious pilgrimage sites. Supposedly the Quebecois people were super religious through most of their history until recently. They don’t seem particularly religious now, as suggested by the guide in one of the churches I stopped in downriver along the route who told me they were lucky to get 200 people in the huge church for a Sunday mass, attendance of only about 10% of the town’s population.  Like Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, the Basilica Notre-Dame-du-Cap is a modern concrete construction, more impressive for its size than for its religious artwork or great beauty.

The remaining hundred miles to Quebec City were lovely, the road paralleling the river much of the way through dairy farms and small towns, each with a huge church that seems much to large for the place. There are several minor historical sites along the route too, one which takes several detours off the already secondary road onto many real backroads.

It felt good to be out of multi-cultural Montreal and out in the Quebec countryside again where the unique regional culture is apparent and almost everyone speaks French. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that unlike 28 years ago on my last trip to the region, it seems as though almost everyone speaks some English and doesn’t mind speaking it. I’m able to figure out the signs and read a lot in French just from knowing English and some Spanish, but I can’t speak a word except for food items and don’t understand anything when people speak to me.

Things seem to have changed a lot from the early 1990s too in that there are few signs of separatism. Some people fly the Quebec Fleur-de-Lys, but it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it was back then during the years of the independence movement.  I have also yet to see a Confederate flag this time. Clearly back in the 1990s many Quebecois identified with the southern secession movement by the fact that there seemed to be more stars-and-bars flying at the time in rural Quebec than in Alabama.

I still quite like the prevailing sense of cultural and ethnic pride Quebec people show and their dedication to not being swallowed up into larger English-speaking North America.  Even in France, KFC is just KFC, but in Quebec they insist on the name being French, so it’s PFK (Poulet Farci Kentucky) here.