Quebec City, and Back to the USA, Sept 14, 2009

Since our last posting, we have driven to a campground near Quebec City. It was about ten miles away on the south side of the Saint Lawrence River, and an easy drive to the old city.

The old city of Quebec City is surrounded by walls, making it, we were told, the only walled city in North America. The picture on the left is of Saint John's Gate. The tower and the rampart give you an idea of the style of the wall.

The city wall is in excellent repair, and quite accessible. In fact, as you can see from the picture below, it is possible to walk on the city walls. That is your correspondent walking toward a fort in the corner of one wall, The fort, the Citadel, was built by the English during the War of 1812, in anticipation of the need to defend against an attack by the United States on Quebec City. (The attack never materialised, so a shot was never fired in anger from the fort.)



Madeline thought the old city was very reminiscent of the streets of cities and small towns in France. The streets were narrow, with two and three story buildings, built with either common walls or with very small spaces between them . The building mostly built with stone and in good repair. With written signs and the predominant conversations in French, it was a very apparent foreign (to us) country, and one would think they were in France --- very picturesque and colorful. The accompanying picture below gives you an example of what I am writing about.




There is quite a bit of street art in front of near many of the buildings The picture below show a statue of a minstrel on the end of a slide from the second floor of a building.

We left Quebec City after a few days and entered the United States through the Vermont border. We traveled on to Burlington, where we camped near Lake Champagne . The lake was very beautiful there, with a view out across islands to mountains in New York State. While in Burlington, we visited with our niece Kathy, who we have not seen for a number of years. it was a nice visit, and we wished we could have stayed longer in Burlington. Unfortunately, Labor Day was upon us, and due to our poor planning on our part, there was no available space in campgrounds in the Burlington area over the Labor Day weekend.

So we moved, driving across the Green Mountains, into Lancaster, New Hampshire. There we visited my cousin, Nancy and my friend, Bob. They took us to a nearby state park,the John Wingate Weeks Estate, which is at the end of a road, atop a nearby Mount Prospect. John Weeks was a wealthy businessman and later a politician from Massachusetts. In his later years he built a home on top of Mount Prospect, which overlooks the town of Lancaster. he built a stone tower, which still stands, and that at one time served a a fire observatory for the Forest Service. From the tower one can get an unparalleled view of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains, and a wonderful view of Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the northeast. I was surprised to learn that one can see the smoke from the cog railroad, when the train approaches the top of Mount Washington.

We were there in a day of singular clear weather. The picture above shows Mount Washington, and if you look closely, you can see a cloud of smoke from the engine of the cog-railroad train, just to the right of the peak of the mountain.

After spending Labor Day weekend in Lancaster, we drove across New Hampshire and part of Maine to Turner, to visit again my cousin, and to pursue more genealogical research.