Île d'Orléans

Twenty minutes away from Quebec City, there's a bridge across the St. Lawrence to an island called L'île d'Orléans. I kept hearing that it was a fun place to visit because it feels like the real countryside. They have kind of a microclimate out there and very rich soil that's good for growing crops, so there are a bunch of farms and orchards and vineyards there. (I think Samuel de Champlain first called it the "Isle of Bacchus," until they decided to change it to please the Duke d'Orleans.) 

Here is the island. It's fairly big compared to the size of the river in that spot (though when you are on the island, the other sides of the river still look really far away!). It has rapidly become one of our favorite places to go! It is so close, but it feels so far away! We have gotten some really good berries and vegetables at farm stands. One place sells blueberry pie that is absolutely amazing. Another place has goat cheese ice cream I just sit and reminisce about from time to time. We are planning to go pick apples at a farm sometime this month. And I wish we could go to one of the maple farms in the spring when they're making syrup! Such a lovely, idyllic spot!

These are a bunch of pictures of various visits we've taken to the island so far—some with all of us, some with Sam and me alone because I wanted to take pictures without a gaggle of impatient children waiting for me, some with just me and Malachi for one of our book lunches. I hope there will be many more!

From far away, you could almost think this was one of our church buildings, couldn't you? It's more ornate, though. There are five villages around the edges of the island, and every one has a pretty church in it. I love that about the towns here. You can always see a steeple soaring out above the trees.

Little jam store with interesting jam flavors like strawberry-lime and rosemary-peach.

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A fun thing we did one day was have lunch at one of the cabanes à sucre on the island. That means something like "sugar shack" and is a place where people could gather to eat and have fun together during sugaring season when the sap was running (since you have to keep it boiling all night long). I've read about places like this in books! Most of them are only open here in the spring, but we found one that is open certain days year-round for big tour groups, and if you call them you can get in on the edges of one of the big groups, since they are going to be opening and cooking that day anyway. (When we went, it was only us and two other families in the dining room. So the tour group must have been earlier in the day?)

They serve a huge family-style meal of traditional Quebecois foods, which are such an interesting mix of traditional French foods, English influence, and what was natively available. Like tourtes salées (French meat pies) made with pigeon (local) and served with a sort of tomato chutney (English). Or baked beans (English) flavored with maple syrup (local) and lard (French). I researched more about Quebecois food when I was making our back-to-school dinner and thought it was fascinating how so many foods have a "cultural heritage" of sorts—like you can trace why it started to be popular and perfected here. 

Just in general it's amazing to me how little I have known of Quebecois (and Canadian, which began as Quebecois) history. It's all been a blank to me, but of course things were happening here all the time they were happening in the Puritan times and the early colonies and the American Revolution! It's been fascinating to learn more about that history and see how it's still affecting things in this place today—in a clearer and more direct way than American history seems to affect our country (maybe just because it's been so diluted and spread out by the mix of cultures). Maybe I'll write more about this sometime, because I've been thinking about it a lot. But before I bore everyone to tears—

I will return to this cabane à sucre meal. There were pork rinds, which were just salty little crunchy chips that Clementine loved. She ate practically the whole bowl of them.

Tourtière (meat pie), fèves au lard, maple shredded pork. They also had lentil soup, potatoes, and pancakes (which were thin and more like crêpes) with maple syrup. Everything was slightly sweet and maple-y because everything was flavored with syrup! It was all so interesting and good.

Malachi wrote about it in his letter home (he has a rapidly-growing group of people back home he writes letters to, like missionary letters, and he is hilarious): 

"Buffets make sense. I mean, maybe not financially, especially if you’re in a state of economic decline like me, but the idea is sound. The idea being if you’re hungry you can keep eating until that stops being the case. This week we went to a restaurant claiming they’d serve us all we could eat. However since it was not a buffet, it didn’t actually make any sense. What really happened was they brought to our table the amount of food they thought we would eat unaware that many of my siblings would refuse to do so to save room for the promised pancakes. And then when our family quickly went through seven hundred pancakes they seemed reluctant to continue providing them, until they eventually guilted us into leaving."

It's a little of an exaggeration because they did willingly keep bringing plate after plate of pancakes for our locust-like children…but we eventually did feel guilty and say we were full even though the children could have easily eaten several more servings.😄

The other funny thing about the place was the "live folk music" during the meal, which was two sad-looking French guys, one of whom was playing the accordion and singing with a recorded music track, and the other of whom was wanly banging spoons on his leg. (Goldie, in this picture, looks like she's eying the food askance, but really she is dubious about the music!) It was very…upbeat…music and the appearance of the musicians provided a rich contrast with it.

The management had also thoughtfully provided spoons (do you know what I am talking about? the instrument spoons, kind of like shakers or clackers you can make a percussive noise with) for each person at the tables, perhaps not realizing that people would actually use them. Clementine was especially happy about them and clacked eagerly whenever she wasn't eating pork rinds.

Sometimes she clacked them on her head.

Goldie is still not sure about the music

All of the food and festivities inside, though, paled in comparison to the best thing of all, which is when we got to try maple syrup poured on snow! I have always longed to try this. I don't know how I've read about it so many times—in Understood Betsy, certainly, and Miracles on Maple Hill, but I feel like it appeared in countless other books as well, so many that it somehow became a Great Dream of mine. It just sounded like it would be so good—the fresh syrup cooling and becoming candy. I imagined it being kind of like a maple sucker or hard candy, but it's even better—it's soft like taffy or caramel. I liked the special two-holed lid they had to make it pour out in neat lines on top of the "snow."

We learned that it's not exactly just syrup--I mean, it's all pure maple sap, but to make this taffy you have to boil it to a certain temperature just like when you're making caramel. Makes sense, I guess, since it basically just is caramel—caramel à l'érable—made with maple sugar instead of cane sugar.

You just touch a popsicle stick to the syrup, and then roll it up around the stick…

…like this. And then you pull it off and eat it all together like a piece of caramel. It is SO good. Some things you look forward to like this don't end up being as good as you imagined them. But this was. Even better! I was marveling about it all the way back to our house, telling my kids over and over how I never thought I would actually get to taste maple syrup poured on snow!

They said we could have "as much as we wanted" of this, too…and they made several pots of it for us…but we did not have "as much as we wanted," far from it. We were far too polite! :)

We saw a little video about the syrup harvesting process, which was fascinating, and then walked around a little. They used to have to put a bucket by every tree, which was of course time-consuming and also wasteful because often the buckets would overflow when you weren't watching them! And you'd be always having to run around changing buckets. So now they often use this ingenious system of tubing, where the syrup flows into tubes and then downhill to a central gathering spot. They have to clean out the tubes after the season so the squirrels won't bite into the tubes to get the syrup—but then they put them back up in preparation for the next season. I thought it was so cool to see the network of tubes running to every tree! I would love to see this forest when the sap is running through it!

This was in early September, and on the island I saw my first glimpse of fall colors on the trees! Just a few little branches, not even whole trees, but it got me excited for the coming of Fall here!

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Some other pretty scenes from the island:

I loved this church and little graveyard right by the river

Wouldn't it be fun to go to the school here and play on the little playground by this church?

More changing trees

You can see the city from this side of the island

There's an observation tower at another end of the island.

You can see way out to some other tiny islands in the river.

Here are the goats at a little goat-cheese dairy. The goat cheese ice cream is so good!

Gnome in a tree

This casse-croûte is really good.

Especially their lobster poutine! Yummmmm!

Another little cheese store

Even more Fall colors!

This place, Foyer de charité Notre-Dame d'Orléans, used to be a convent and is still a church of some kind. You can go on "retreats" there. This would be the spot to do it! It's so peaceful!

Ah, I feel peaceful just looking at it!