Thursday September 22nd
On the way into the park the camper had put up a little message telling me to change its oil. Usually I change the oil before a long trip but as the camper had this automatic feature I'd decided to let it do its job and tell me when a change was needed. Having done this I could hardly argue with the camper that this wasn't a convenient time and that it had to wait until we both got back.
So we had to drive into Quebec City in pouring rain looking for somewhere to get an oil change. The easy choice was Canadian Tire as its stores are highly visible, but the first we came to said that they couldn't do campers. His English and my French weren't up to understanding why, but he gave me directions to a camper repair place that might be able to do it. Unfortunately, he didn't realize that the road number changed a little way down the road and we were soon off down the wrong freeway in the wrong direction. I guessed what the problem was but couldn't easily get off and back. We saw another Canadian Tire and went to try that one. This time I found a good English speaker and she explained that we were too heavy for their lifts. We made our way back to where we'd gone wrong and eventually found the camper place. They sent me up the road to the place that does oil changes for them. He didn't have a lift - just jacked up a corner of the camper and crawled underneath. He said that he'd just heard on the radio that the price of gas was going to double because of the impact of Hurricane Rita on the gulf refineries.
We needed to buy food, but, of course, none of the supermarket names were familiar, and we ended up going into an all-fruit supermarket, and a giant fishmonger's before we found what we needed. We also had to navigate around long queues of cars lining up to buy gas before the price went up. After all this we had lost track of our original road and ended up navigating towards the east by compass. Although Vieux (Old) Quebec is a great place to visit it has some low arches that we wouldn't fit through, so I hoped to avoid the area this time. Eventually we spotted an elevated freeway pointing in the right direction and after an accidental tour of the docks joined the rush hour traffic leaving the city. We passed Montmerency Falls, a great waterfall that can be seen for miles.
We were headed for another wilderness area so we needed gas, but of course almost all the gas stations were packed with frantic buyers. A few stations had run out of gas and closed. A few others had boosted their price by 50% and they were deserted. Eventually we found a cheap one that had a shorter queue. Of course, by the time we'd filled up with a hundred and twenty litres they had a much longer queue! In Quebec they still pump the gas for you and, naturally, they always ensure that it's "'plet" or full to the brim.