Last night, the NDP swept through Alberta like a prairie fire, consuming all the old chaff and tired trees in its path and leaving clean slates for the Orange Crush to steer back into lush fields. We had to be up by 5AM to make the early train to Quebec City, but sleep didn’t arrive until well after one in the morning, after the polls had closed and every newspaper called it and the majority vote clambered up and up and up.
Five AM: given our propensity to sleep in, all electronic devices are scattered to each corner of the room and rigged to jangle and bleat at the stroke of five and no later. We manage to make the 6:15AM eastbound train and watch as the Montreal skyline gives way to sweeping fields and grain silos and the banks of the Saint Lawrence. We try to sleep. I can’t write; between the rattling of the train and the heavyness of last night, my mind is in too many places at once to find a shred of sleep.
Quebec City: All plots and plans are thrown immediately out the window as we disembark. Each street twists and dives back into another, stairwells appear from nowhere and lead beyond, and every second store is an art gallery or framer with treasures lining his or her windows. Antique dealers, pubs and souvenir shops populate the crowded, brick-lined streets, bubbling with out-of-towners and clusters of rumbling schoolchildren asking where they could see all the “soldier stuff.” We get lost more than a few times between late morning poutine and afternoon coffee at the mighty museum, and somehow manage to miss the Plains of Abraham entirely, with a miscalcuation sending us skittering along the banks of the St. Lawrence instead of the hills and fields where troops died by the dozens.
The day winds down in a pub before boarding the 5:45PM back to Montreal, where I finally find the impetus to put some words together. My body is exhausted (The city is roughly 80% stairs) and my mind is a wreck, but we can now say we’ve been to one of the oldest cities in Canada… albeit in a somewhat meandering fashion. Back to Montreal to sleep like the dead before tackling the heart of downtown tomorrow.
polloparringtonpresents 