Foldyourarmsandsaynah wrote:whiskerando wrote:if the point of this thread was to visit? don't visit. way cooler places to visit that aren't much further away. while working at one of the aforementioned mini golf places i would deal with loads of tourists and so very many of them were from Quebec that i finally just asked one guy "you know there are better beaches on your way here and past here right?" "Oui" "why come here?" "eh, vaycayshun uh?"
To that point I always noticed that the Queblowmes that have come down to visit have always been pretty nice and a pleasure to talk to either when I was working or when I'd start talking to them at the bars.
But I still don't know why they come here. The New England beaches are more interesting and anything south of us has a lower grime to saltwater ratio. Maybe they're just happy to be the hell out of canada. Maybe it's cheaper here than some other beaches.
They might be making stops on an unhurried drive down to Florida, where the Journal de Montréal is distributed in substantial numbers and poutine can even be found. New England beaches hold little appeal for people who can go freeze their ass off on coarse sand much closer to home. My best guess is that Quebec people don't like things fancy and thus find low-key, populist and downmarket tourist destinations particularly comfortable. Cheap is a good guess too -- people here don't make that much.
My mom, who spent most of her summers in Wildwood NJ when she was a kid, remembers when Quebec people first started to show up there in large numbers after I-87 was finished. A motel down from her aunt's house remodeled and renamed itself "Le Motel Bleu" and everyone thought it was impossibly European and sophisticated to have francophones walking around.
