Bonne St-Jean Baptiste/ Fête Nationale du Québec

Bonne St-Jean Baptiste à tous les Québécois!    

Yes, today is a major holiday in Québec province, the mostly French-speaking province of Canada. June 24th is St-Jean Baptiste, or St. John the Baptist Day, which is also know as the Fête Nationale du Québec.

Usually on this day, I post a standard, boilerplate blog entry and leave it at that. In fact, I already posted that earlier today.

However, this year, I felt like doing something different. It occurred to me that I personally have not been to Québec City, specifically, since my son and I visited it in 2017. I have not been to Québec province since the autumn of 2019. In fact, I have not been anywhere inside of Canada now since the first few hours of 2020, when my son and I rang in the New Year's countdown at Niagara Falls in Ontario, with a free Bryan Adams concert. It was fun, but that was 3 1/2 years ago already!

That is unusual. My first ever trip to Canada was to Montréal back in the summer of 1983, when my grandparents took us there for a few days. Then, my parents decided we should enjoy a holiday trip to Montréal for the holiday week before Christmas and New Year's in December of 1988 into the first day of 1989. Since then, trips up north to Canada, and especially to Québec province, have become regular outings. For a while, I made multiple trips per year. There was only one stretch - over four years between late summer of 1992 and October of 1996 - when I actually had a longer drought of not having made it to Canada since we started going. Hopefully, that will change soon. 

But since today is St-Jean Baptiste, which is to say the big holiday in Québec province, and one week from today will be Canada Day, I will make an effort to publish some blog entries about Canada throughout this celebratory week in Canada. It feels like it's been too long since I posted anything about Canada, but I will try to remedy that this coming week.

These will include some pictures which I recently discovered, and some which I worked over and tried to alter for improvements. In some cases, in fact, I both recently discovered or recovered them, and then tried to improve them. Also, I wanted to delve into the state of things in Canada right now, since we outside of that country seem to rarely ever hear about it. It's a great country, and I miss it!

For now, let me post just a few pictures from long ago trips. Enjoy!

The roof of the Château Frontenac peeks out over the Plains of Abraham. 

The Château Frontenac on a rainy night. This was one of my very favorite pictures that I had taken, but it seemed like it simply vanished at some point. I thought that I had lost this picture long ago, but was so pleased to find it again recently, when I went through the old saved pictures on my older email account. It also was quite a bit more blurry than I remembered it being, so I took the liberty of working on it, making some alterations. Here is the product of some of those labors. Some of the pictures actually look quite good, if I say so myself.