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| KOA Quebec City |
Thursday.
A traveling day, with a trip of 500 Km inland along the St Lawrence River, almost to the upper end of Lake Ontario and a place called Gananoque.
But first, a few lines about the KOA (Kampgrounds Of America) site in Quebec City. KOAs are commercial campgrounds that specialise in providing transient sites, that is not renting out a single pitch for a whole season, and offering tons of things for kids to do; usually that means a pool and play area and the like. Their individual pitches are often quite small and close together but they normally provide electricity, water and sewer connections which make staying in one place for more than a couple of days quite feasible. This KOA, in the manner of an EasyJet destination, was some way from Quebec City and curiously it was sited between a couple of industrial plots next to the Autoroute. It's closeness to the busy highway wasn't an issue as the main camping ground was down a small hill and hidden by trees. It being adjacent to industrial units made it relatively quite, too, so it wasn't actually a bad place to be especially as the management had a link up with a local bus tour company and ran daily shuttle buses into Old Quebec. The pitches were small and close to each other and when we arrived the campground was pretty full, so the place resembled a caravan storage yard, and yet it wasn't noisy and, even with our pitch being right at the entry and exit point to the main camping area, I still felt like we were relatively private. Certainly the propensity for campers to have ratty old diesel pick-up trucks that sounded like tractors made it a little noisy when they went by, but it wasn't an issue. The facilities were excellent; clean showers, pool, kids play area with the now familiar bouncy pillow and a shop that not only rivaled a small supermarket but carried wine and beer, too. So, what on paper could have been a poor campground turned out to be really rather good. The one thing the management didn't do, though, was fix the weather. It was more like October than August and in that respect we were happy to be leaving and heading south (and west).
It was a slow process breaking camp, perhaps because it was cold and we were sluggish. When we did get out on the road, we had a reasonably straightforward run along the banks of the St Lawrence River, south to begin with and then north later in the day. Only the city of Montreal posed any worry as I knew from previous experience that the highways go right through the urban areas and are normally very busy.
On a full tank of fuel we went south, first towards Drummondville, and immediately felt wicked headwind. It has been windy since day one of this trip but up until today, it has been at our backs mostly. Now were were going straight into it. Wind is probably the caravanner's worst enemy as the the frontal area of the trailer adds huge amounts of drag and puts a strain on the tow vehicle. With an Airstream, that frontal area isn't so big and is eased somewhat with its curved lines, which is why it's called an Airstream, but even so the Toadmobile was really feeling the added wind resistance. The automatic gearbox which would normally have us running in sixth most of the time, struggled to maintain fifth. The Scanguage was reporting 100-110 horsepower being developed when normally it'd be 60 or 70. The fuel trip meter was on 23.5 litres per 100 Km (and going up) when we have been doing between between 17 and 18 on this trip; I reckoned we'd need to stop for gas a tad earlier than usual!
The run down to Montreal was uneventful apart from the tugging on the wheel as the wind pulled us about. The big eighteen-wheelers going by always cause a bow wave of air that requires a steering correction but today it was worse than usual. Mind you, I did slipstream a truck for a few miles at 90 Km/h, ten below usual, and the gas mileage immediately showed improvement. The trouble is that it isn't really safe to slipstream like that, and the drop in speed just makes the trip longer.
Into Montreal and I wasn't surprised that the horrible highways were made even more horrible with many Traveaux and Diversions. Mostly the Circulation was Fluide but lane designations had been altered and I had to be really careful to be in the right lane at the right time or end up disappearing into the chaos of the city, something I'd rather not do with a trailer hitched to the car. I've said before that if you don't have any French then you could get yourself really stuck going through Montreal as the road work signs are resolutely in French only. The guiding lights in Quebec are rabid about retaining their language and I don't disagree that it's very important, but to completely exclude Canada's other official language is wrong; road work signs in Ontario are in French and English so why not in Quebec?
There's an aside here related to Quebec. We saw a sign to a Parc National just east of Montreal and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a Canadian National Park, but Canadian National Parks are run by Parks (or Parcs) Canada so this one, despite being called "national" was in fact Provincial. It speaks volumes about the political landscape in Quebec that they already consider their Province is a country in its own right. Political commentary over.
So, having emerged unscathed from Montreal's highways, we made our way south west, now on the north bank of the river. The tank of gas lasted until about 20 kms east of the Ontario border so we made our last stop in Quebec to fill up. The gas was $1.45 a litre, easily 10 cents or more higher than Ontario, and it cost me $90 to fill up - that's another consequence of the political landscape in Quebec. Just saying, loike.
Back into Ontario and we ran the final 150 kms or so into the wind and raised knowing eyebrows at the resolutely bi-lingual road signs. There were yet more construction sites on the road but we weren't delayed and arrived on the 1000 Islands Parkway pretty much when we expected to and still had some gas. The trip meter was showing consumption at 22.6 l/100km; terrible, but it could have been worse.
We're on another KOA here and this one is different again, but more about that in later posts. We backed into our (very snug) site, unhitched and set up camp. The weather was certainly better than in Quebec but the wind was a tad on the nippy side so supper was taken inside Towed Haul rather than out. We had a short mooch around the campground, spoke to some Airstreamers who had a 1966 model and were towing it with a lovely old American Station Wagon, then headed back to our site for an early night. The early night, I have to say, wasn't planned but as I fell asleep on the sofa at 9.30pm I thought it better to give in and hit the sack straight away.
Tomorrow is a free day so I think sleep-ins are in order. More posts to come, Toad fans, so don't go away.
