Québec - Exploring French Canada 🇫🇷

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to learn how to speak French.

I remember getting a psychic reading once and she told me that I was a French woman in one of my past lives. I guess it made me curious as to whether I’d be really good at speaking French.

Well, I’m not so there’s that. But at least I got to give it a good shot when visiting beautiful Québec.

As soon as you cross the border into the province of Québec, all of the road signs change to French and nobody uses their indicators! Haha, it was mayhem, for us anyway.

Our first stop was the city of Montréal. What a great city! We absolutely loved it there. We stayed at an Airbnb in Mile End. It was a short walk to Mont Royal which is a large hill in the middle of the city. It’s a public park and it’s absolutely stunning.

We were also quite close to some beautiful coloured houses. Montréal is full of them and I could spend days admiring them all. I enjoyed cycling around the city on Bixi bikes, checking out the brightly painted, character filled homes. One day we biked over 40kms!

The bagels from Fairmount Bagel are crazy delicious. The everything bagel with some cream cheese and smoked salmon - yum! They have a huge selection of flavours and I’ve almost tried all of them.

And be sure to try some poutine if you're ever in town. It's Canada's national dish after all and it originated just north of Montréal.

We also visited the Montréal Botanical Gardens. The grounds were very nice and there were these beautiful Monarch butterflies everywhere that day.

Annnd...I’ve saved my favourite until last. Pâtisserie Au Kouign Amann is out of this world. I'm sure this place is the reason I gained 10kgs last year. Their ham and cheese croissants with bechamel sauce - AMAZING! I went back many times for these babies. And sometimes the line was out the door. And it’s a sad sad day when they sell out 🥐

Our next stop was Québec City. We were about a 20 minute (uphill) walk into Old Québec. Old Québec is straight out of a fairytale. I’d love to see it all covered in snow one day. Alas, there was no snow in the middle of Summer, but we did get a bucket load of rain. We were still able to explore the city and it meant that it wasn’t too busy. I loved all of the cobblestone streets and stone buildings. They were just delightful. It feels like you’ve been magically transported into Europe. It's a very romantic city.

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Then we were off to the Gaspésie Peninsula. The drive along the coastline was stunning. We came across beautiful little towns, nestled between the mountains and the ocean. Our first stop was at Forillon National Park where we camped for a couple of nights. The rugged coastline up there is beautiful and there are porcupines EVERYWHERE! I’d never seen one before in my life so it was really cool to see them wandering around. We even caught a glimpse of the Northern Lights one night.

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Next we spent some time in a place called Carleton-sur-Mer. We camped out on a long spit of land for a few nights. Here we ate the most amazing scallops I think I’ve ever had. Ben got the campfire going and fried them up in butter and garlic 👌🏻

We drove to the top of Mont Saint-Joseph which is a tall mountain overlooking the town of Carleton-sur-Mer. The road up is so steep that our car started to smoke once we reached the top. At the very top is a beautiful old church. And the view is great. You can even see into the next province, New Brunswick.

Québec is a beautiful part of the world and it was great to be able to experience another language, while still being in the same country. And although I only got a few words down, everyone was super friendly and frankly quite surprised to hear my accent. I had a person tell me that they had never met an Australian woman before. I thought that was pretty cool!

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