Our adventure in old Quebec

Yesterday we spent several hours in old Quebec City where we felt we had magically crossed the pond and stepped into Paris.  The dominant language in all of the Quebec is French and every sign and road marker is written in French which can make it very frustrating to drive.  The people are all very friendly and happy to speak english if needed.  City streets wind a lot and are very narrow with quaint shops on both sides.  It was very nice, but also a bit claustrophobic - lots of tourists walking around from three cruise ships.

It was really interesting to walk through the streets and see the different places.  At about 3pm we decided to leave, the streets were getting really busy and we wanted to avoid rush hour.  So we hopped into the car, turned on the GPS, and started driving.  Traffic was really bad, bumper to bumper and going really slow. The GPS was really quite frustrating because it kept routing us back toward the old part of the city.  We couldn't understand it and had talked about turning it off and driving by instinct.  You can probably guess we were headed toward disaster. :-)  For some reason we left it on and drove a bit further.  I was just about to reach up and turn it off when it said, "Turn left onto ferry".  Ferry?  We knew we were by the river but didn't know anything about a ferry and couldn't see one at that point. But we turned left anyway and drove up to a booth where the guy talked to me in French.  I just smiled and pointed to the other side of the river and handed him ten dollars.  Twenty minutes later the ferry docked on the other side of the river and we drove off to dry land.  We figure this saved us a couple of hours of very frustrating driving in the city.  Thank you again Rich for lending us your GPS!