Friends visit and a trip to Quebec City

Umbrellas, cafes and a palace

We were lucky enough to host friends visiting from Boise this past week. After a few days in our home, we moved on to Quebec City to share some adventures. This image of a street where we settled for a lunch of wine, pizza, salad and amazing coffee featured umbrellas with a view of the Frontenac hotel. A palace, really. 

The leaves were close to full color, and unlike previous visits to Quebec, the plethora of public gardens still could be enjoyed with live plants. Some of them were still blooming, but the mixture of plant bloom, leaf colors and textures, and the sheer overwhelming abundance of these plants (with no visible weeds) was astonishing, even to a seasoned horticulturist like myself. Wow. That was a long sentence.

I tried to take some pictures of the gardens as a whole, but the camera just can't do justice to what the eye can see. So I'll settle for showing you an image of a hibiscus in bloom.

Hibiscus flower

In previous trips to QC, we had seen a coffee shop in the Plains of Abraham, a huge park in the center of the city. We wandered back on day one, and had most excellent coffee, croissants, and a table on the patio. At said table, we were entertained by a trio of penguins to the sounds of a rushing fountain. Amazing.

and the band played on. . .

It was a nice trip. . . a great interlude to all of the national nonsense, and a great opportunity to support the Canadians. 

Thanks especially to M and A, who made the long trip across the country to visit us and things Maine and Quebecois. 

So now it's back to the garden, the beautiful fall weather, and a substantial rainfall that is staving off the drought, however temporarily.