Chateau Frontenac

extremely beautiful…
i went in briefly to use the restroom. lol.

If you like the place, I suggest you to take guided tours. The guide will show stuff that you can’t find yourself. Guide was wearing a 1800’s fashion dress and acting.

Flew into Albany NY, drove to Montreal, then Quebec on back down through Maine….beautiful in the fall but I’d love to go back and stay again at the Chateau Frontenac in the winter.

We stayed here for our honeymoon in April of 2002. I want to go back again!

I think her name was Denise. And I think she was a Cajun, which, to this Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-centric North Louisianian, meant that she was trouble. But it was all very exciting. I was studying French in Jonquière, P.Q. for part of the summer of 1974. The program under aegis of which I was there arranged weekend trips for us. My roommate Tommy C. (from Cecilia, Louisiana and a Cajun, but somehow not trouble) and I elected to go to Québec City, where, for only a small portion of the day in question, we came under the influence of the young woman I am remembering as Denise.

She, having already been to the Château Frontenac, persuaded us not to limit our admiration to standing outside gawking and taking photos, rather to enter and to follow her on the same caprice she had undertaken prior. Ah, the effect of her siren song. We complied. We followed her into the lobby, straight to the elevator, where she programmed the machinery to take us to the topmost floor. We stepped out of the elevator and continued to follow her lead, as she headed to the far end of a hallway, where she clasped the knob of a door labeled “Staff only. No admittance.” On the other side, we encountered a rickety wooden stairway that lead up, up, and up … I no longer remember how far. My heart was racing with the anxious delight of forbidden enterprise.

We eventually ended up in the garret, wandering through long-abandoned, dusty, and disheveled rooms, rooms once assigned perhaps to servants of hotel patrons or to live-in employees of the establishment itself. So-called Denise directed me and my camera to a window, from which I was able to take a photo of the statue of Champlain, the Terrasse Dufferin, and la Place d’Armes below.

Our project completed, we made our way down, down, down and out of the hotel, disencumbered now by a need for stealth. Given my historical high level of investment in being as good a little boy as I could possibly manage (and enjoying the benefits of the resultant invisibility, I might add), I felt wickedly exultant in having defied directions posted on a door in a foreign establishment of high esteem. And my assessment of the dangerous nature of Cajuns was confirmed, with the exception of my roommate Tommy, of course. Denise went her way, Tommy and I went ours, where we busied ourselves in blandly normative touristic experiences of the city for the remainder of our stay.

[Tommy C. makes another appearance in an entry about his hometown: Cecilia, Louisiana.]