Yes, we had Canadian quarters in our stash from our last trip to Canada—just enough for two showers.
We started the morning wit a bit of a bird walk around the campground, with most of our luck down by the kayak launching area. It is very tough to see little birds in the deep woods of the Baie Sauvage campground. They tease you by singing right overhead, but hide behing those leaves and needles. A bit of breakfast (Ellen's excellent banana bread), the aformentioned showers and we were off to the visitor center on our way out.
We wanted access to WiFi to check mail and find a Virgin Mobile store (more later) and to get a pair of Quebec park passes. They have a pass that allows free entry into any of the Quebec parks and has a few other discounts as well. It was $133 for a family pair of passes, but it seemed worth is since it saves $8.50 per day and they refunded our daily fee for yesterday. We also get one free night of camping per pass, so it should pay for itself pretty quickly.
I was looking for a Vigin Mobile store because I bought a Virgin Mobile Canada SIM card via Amazon for my phone before we left. I was able to get it activated as a prepaid service, but they would not accept a US credit card over the phone. So, I had to find a store here to chnage it to a talk + data plan and prepay a month's service. The closest one that was on the way was a store called La Source in Thetford Mines. So off we went.
It was in a mall called Carrefour Frontenac, which reminded us of Hanover Mall. La Source was very similar to a Radio Shack. Was our lack of French going to be a problem? The first person I talked to had a smattering of english, but another employee came up to the counter and they asked him if he could understand our request. He asked me if I understood English. He was obviously from another province as he had perfect unaccented English and admitted it was hard to understand his colleagues sometimes.
Since they weren't actually a Virgin Mobile store, just a retailer of their products, he couldn't direct change my plan, but suggested that we just add enough to the account and then call Virgin Mobile support. He sold me a top-up code and off we went. The upgrade was much easier than I'd anticipated. I followed the instructions for topping up the account and then transferred to a support person. She changed my plan in about two minutes and we were done. We now have a Canadian mobile number and 250MB of data (not much, I know but enough to occasionally check mail and upload Speedy Journal entries.
I have set up our Google Voice account such that if one makes a call to our home number, it gets forwarded to my cell phone. Supposedly inbound calls are free. We'll see.
We then headed of towards Saint-Nicolas, just south of Quebec City. It is where Safari Condo is located. We have an appointment there tomorrow morning to look at a ProMaster-based Class B. It seems to have a layout very similar to Speedy's and might be a possible replacement. (We forgot Speedy's title!) That wouldn't make a difference, since it takes about a year to get one built and we would have to provide a US-spec van. But since we were here, we wanted to see what they actually look like.
This is where the roller coaster comes into it. As I mentioned, they seem to have drawn the roads through this very hilly part of Quebec with a ruler. They went up and down most of the way here. There were more than a few 10%+ grades and even more in the 7-10% range. They even managed to throw in a few downhill curves. Speedy does not make a good roller coaster. We did about 150km today, about two-thirds was on the roller coaster.
We got to Saint-Nicolas at about 2:30pm and found a commercial campground, Sois-bois du Campeur, a few kilometers up the road from Safari Condo. It is quite the opposite of Baie Sauvage, with few trees and sites right next to each other. But it is level and clean and has showers (pay, of course and take dollar coins) and has WiFi (which has been a bit iffy).
Looks like a wet viewing tomorrow. It is raining now and is expected to continue into tomorrow. At least it will be cooler. The days have been in the high 80s so far.
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