Moving on, let's just establish that the previous tour wrapped spectacularly some time in...2009 and then life happened for awhile and now we've crossed the Atlantic into Canada, for reasons. Tour #2 begins in beautiful old Quebec City, Quebec, for reasons that are in part geographic, but mostly inspired by figure skating. Speaking of, thanks for the lovely snow pictures to start us off, International Skating Union on Facebook:
Quebec City's history is the thing, and the Musée de la Civilisation seems as good a place as any to begin. The centerpiece, particularly for our purposes, is Place-Royale, historic grounds which the delightful museum website makes available for virtual tourists through 360 panoramas and extensive commentary. While other onsite exhibits and historic sites have far less of an online presence, but with the information at hand, I would be rather inclined to explore On the Road: The Francophone Odyssey. Though it evokes a few unwelcome memories of long-ago repeated required readings of Longfellow's Evangeline, the fresh historical perspective and promise of interactivity sounds rather irresistible as these things go.
If you prefer to explore a museum while pretending to star in your own Newberry-potential young adult mystery, The Lost Code is at your service. In this engaging little game, visit three museum sites and explore areas to uncover encyclopedic blurbs pertaining to regional history. Gather enough keywords and clues to unlock new levels of further historical exploration! Timesucker? Surely. Good nerdy fun? Indubitably.
Moving along, our next stop is the charmingly named Le Temps Retrouvé. Unfortunately, the charmingly named establishment has no commercial website. It would seem, however, to be an excellent used book and furniture shop, and this is well, though more detail would certainly be welcome. But a photo will serve for now.
Finally, for some good aesthetic fun, we'll swing by two top visitor destinations. Parc de la Chute-Montmorency -- grander than Niagara Falls and twice as Canadian -- looks to be a spectacular wintertime site. I mean, really.
The opulent Notre-Dame de Quebec Basilica Cathedral, meanwhile, is North America's oldest parish and a National Historic Site of Canada, of which several better pictures can be found here.
But I can't wrap this up without offering links to better resources than I: National Geographic provides an evocative guide, while this video tribute to the joys of winter in Quebec City comes from a TOTALLY IMPARTIAL party.
And now this has become wordy enough that it may simply be easier to conclude with one last pretty, pretty image, before we depart for the next stop on our Grand Canadian Tour:
