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  #381  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2016, 1:29 PM
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I'd say that the vast majority of people in Quebec have been to Gaspesie, New Brunswick, Ogunquit, Kennebunk, Old Orchard, Cape Cod, Myrtle Beach, the Caribeans, etc, so they know what an open body of water looks like. Cobourg and the Maine beaches are about the same distance from Montreal.

I think those you saw were re surprised to see such a nice beach and pier west of Quebec. I certainly was the first time I went to Cobourg. It was a total surprise to me.
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Are you serious ?!?
You make it sound like la Gaspésie or Old Orchard don't exist ;-)
Not sure guys but if people look absolutely thrilled by the sight they usually have Quebec plates.
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  #382  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2016, 1:31 PM
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Not sure guys but if people look absolutely thrilled by the sight they usually have Quebec plates.
Haha. I guess we know how to appreciate the beauty of Ontario, then!
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  #383  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 3:49 AM
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I did a boat tour of the Saguenay River fjord today and really enjoyed it. I live in Northern Ontario by the way. I've been all over Quebec and Atlantic Canada including Newfoundland and Labrador. The Saguenay River is quite impressive even though I'd say Newfoundland is much better for scenery. But I love visiting both places.

I've seen Quebeckers who were impressed with Lake Superior in Northern Ontario. Even though they have large bodies of open water in their own province.
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  #384  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 6:32 AM
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Part of it could also be the fact it's a lake. I'm sure I would have looked surprised and excited if someone filmed my first time seeing it as well. It was fascinating, how it could seem so familiar yet be so different from the ocean, with water that somehow seemed a different color and texture. I was also shocked you couldn't see all the way across as they were smaller in my imagination. My first time seeing large ships on it evoked a similar reaction.
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  #385  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 12:49 PM
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#SecretsOut

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  #386  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 3:13 PM
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Part of it could also be the fact it's a lake. I'm sure I would have looked surprised and excited if someone filmed my first time seeing it as well. It was fascinating, how it could seem so familiar yet be so different from the ocean, with water that somehow seemed a different color and texture. I was also shocked you couldn't see all the way across as they were smaller in my imagination. My first time seeing large ships on it evoked a similar reaction.
Indeed.

I may be from the Maritimes and have grown up on PEI (with Cavendish Beach), but I distinctly remember being very impressed by the beach at Kincardine ON, on the shores of Lake Huron. The beach was beautiful, the opposite shore was invisible and the colour of the water an unusual azure. Their was a nice harbor and a marina and a lighthouse to boot. It all seemed rather tropical to me.

I'm sure the reaction of the QC tourists might have been something similar.
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  #387  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 6:12 PM
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Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker View Post
Part of it could also be the fact it's a lake. I'm sure I would have looked surprised and excited if someone filmed my first time seeing it as well. It was fascinating, how it could seem so familiar yet be so different from the ocean, with water that somehow seemed a different color and texture. I was also shocked you couldn't see all the way across as they were smaller in my imagination. My first time seeing large ships on it evoked a similar reaction.
On the right day you can even go surfing; waves at times are several meters.
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  #388  
Old Posted Aug 16, 2016, 6:19 PM
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Wow, watched it twice. That's a very well-done campaign.
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  #389  
Old Posted Aug 20, 2016, 2:15 PM
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Telegraph has gone a bit off the deep end with this one, but embarrassingly flattering just the same.

North America's most unlikely culinary capital - which you can reach in five hours

Quote:
It’s summer in Newfoundland, time to discover my inner hunter-gatherer – well, the gatherer bit anyway. I drive 40 minutes west from the capital, St John’s, to the tiny settlement of Avondale on Conception Bay and rendezvous with Lori McCarthy outside a grocery store called Flynn’s. She checks out my sturdy footwear, says we’re good to go, and I follow her 4x4 down to a little cove backed by a church peeping from trees. “One of the most lucrative beaches for pickin’,” she says.

Pickin’ is what the people of Newfoundland, the easternmost of Canada’s Atlantic provinces, have always done, since they starting arriving from the British Isles on fishing fleets in the 17th century. Pickin’ means foraging for “edibles” – plants, berries, fungi, shellfish, whatever you fancy that won’t kill you. “The growing season was short, the soil was bad, they had to live off the land,” she says, stooping among the pebbles to pluck the tiny leaves of a plant called beach orach.

The tradition has faded, what with fridges and supermarkets. Now Lori, a former restaurant chef, is reviving and repurposing it – showing people a healthy and sustainable way forward as well as plugging them back into their history.

She supplies seven of the more innovative restaurants in St John’s, where a gastronomic revolution has been taking place over the past five years. And operating as Cod Sounds, “a culinary excursion company”, she takes people out on foraging trips before treating them to another Newfoundland tradition, a “boil-up” on the beach.

For visitors like me these expeditions are a means of experiencing and understanding the essence of Newfoundland culture in one hit – people’s profound connection to the land, the austere Atlantic beauty of the place, the simplicity of life.

Newfoundland’s ancestral proximity to England and Ireland has always made it a comfortable place to visit but it’s physically close, too. Through the summer, Air Canada and the low-cost airline Westjet have direct daily flights (from Heathrow and Gatwick respectively) to St John’s and with a flying time of five hours and a time difference of minus three-and-a-half hours, it’s a feasible destination for a weekend break (the restaurants are worth a trip in their own right).

Today Lori has brought her “right arm”, a young chef, Eoin Seviour, who enthuses about the plumpness of the spruce tips (“Newfoundland capers”) before popping some in a bag. Scouring the rocks and rock pools, they lift and bag sugar kelp (you wrap it around cod before roasting it on the fire), lovage (“like parsley”), forget-me-nots and ox-eye daisies (for salad garnish), oyster plant (“highly sought after, great with seafood”), sea rocket (pungent and sharp as horseradish) and goose-tongue (“like chives”).

The goody bags Lori and Eoin fold up are destined for some of St John’s best kitchens and it was Lori who turned them on to the idea of incorporating local, foraged plants into their menus. This approach was of course pioneered by Noma restaurant in Copenhagen and it was reading the recipes of Noma’s chef, René Redzepi, that gave Lori her idea.

“A lot of the stuff, I thought, 'that grows here, that grows here…’ and that’s how the foraging for the restaurants started.”

Meanwhile the restaurants had been creating a distinct culinary identity for Newfoundland, where imaginative, sophisticated food had been rare. In 2014, the province cemented its growing reputation when a St John’s restaurant, Raymonds, earned the accolade of Canada’s finest in the Top Restaurants in Canada rankings. It retained the title last year and Lori is taking me there this evening as part of a restaurant crawl of downtown St John’s. But first: the boil-up.

From the beach at Avondale, we drive inland and north for 20 minutes, then rejoin the fretted coastline of Conception Bay, beyond a settlement called Bay Roberts; park and walk to a rocky cove and a fire pit in which Eoin gets a blaze of birch logs going. While a pot of water comes to the boil, he ties blackcurrant leaves, wild strawberry flowers and juniper berries in an infusion bag. Tea is served.

Lori, meanwhile, wades into a rock pool, comes back with three sea urchins and cuts the bottoms off the shells with the scissors attached to her belt.

She scrapes out the intestinal tract to leave an orange starfish of roe, and spoons one up to my mouth on the tip of the scissors blades – a salt bomb of taste. “It’s natural for us to be here,” she says, recalling an outdoor childhood hanging around the beach and the wharves, picking berries with her mother in the autumn.

In a pan she fries onions and garlic, throws in mussels which open to reveal little orange inflatables of flesh, and garnishes them with lovage.

I eat them standing up, exclaiming with pleasure. Then she brings out “a pretty big treat” – diver-harvested scallops, obtained from a fisherman friend, “which you can’t buy in Newfoundland”. The scallops are plump and big as chicken eggs.

She slices them thinly and places them on flat stones that have been heated in the fire and glazed with butter. On the top she sprinkles oyster plant and lemon zest and holds the stone while I eat.

For the second batch, Eoin adds a refinement – orange sea urchin roe placed on top of the white discs of scallop so they resemble tiny eggs. Angel’s eggs, judging from the taste.

That evening Lori, Eoin and I start our gastronomic sampling of St John’s in Chinched Bistro (“chinched” means roughly “full to bursting”), where owners Michelle LeBlanc and Shaun Hussey produce their own charcuterie, pickles and pâté. We polish off a “combo board” of charcuterie and cheese, with an Iceberg beer from the local Quidi Vidi brewery, and move on to The Reluctant Chef.

The Reluctant Chef has a split personality – downstairs, where Joe Strummer is singing about Spanish bombs, is the Vinyl Room, with a huge album collection to choose from and a snack menu that includes braised beef shepherd’s pie or lobster roll for $10, about £5.50. Upstairs (it’s a large, historic house) are two, more formal dining rooms serving a five-course set menu which, when I am there, features lamb croquettes with foraged corn lily sauce, cod and dandelion broth and stewed rhubarb with lovage granite and sorrel.

“The locally foraged stuff has exploded,” says Tony Butt, the proprietor. “Twenty-five years ago we didn’t even do mushrooms.”

And so to what is officially the finest dining experience this side of the 49th parallel. Raymonds, housed in a neoclassical Edwardian building overlooking the harbour, has a classy, international atmosphere – we could be in London’s West End. The cloths are linen, the voices hushed; waiters and a sommelier float and spiel and the executive chef himself – a he-bearded Jeremy Charles – makes a point of saying “hello”.

Capelin is on the menu, a tiddler (the waiter commends me for wolfing the head) not eaten much these days but now being rehabilitated by Newfoundland’s culinary new wave. I follow this with scallops, and comparing them with the ones I had sampled that morning on the beach is irresistible.

Anticipating my verdict, Lori winces, but she needn’t. No disrespect to the estimable Raymonds, but hers will always taste better than those served in a conventional restaurant setting because they contain a super-ingredient: that moment, eating off the hot, buttered rock, of feeling at one with the land and the sea and new foodie friends.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/de...inary-capital/
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  #390  
Old Posted Sep 1, 2016, 6:15 PM
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This is kinda tourism related, a fascinating read by the NY Times. A freighter trip through four of the Great Lakes is chronicled in a recent NY Times feature that provides vivid detail about the six-day voyage from Montreal to Thunder Bay.

From Montreal to Minnesota, by Inland Sea

I was so used to driving and flying, my understanding of North America had become distorted. Then I took a slow boat through four Great Lakes. I saw every mile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/tr...=top-news&_r=3
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  #391  
Old Posted Oct 2, 2016, 2:56 AM
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Quebec City was named Cultural City of the Year at the Leading Culture Destination Awards, whatever that is. Los Angeles and Lyon were the other two cities vying for the title. The title obviously doesn't mean much since this seems like another one of those 'rank this city' type of award. However, it is still interesting to note that Quebec City did not even put its name forward for the candidacy. It was all initiated by cultural ambassadors from all over the world. Anyways, it is what it is and as the saying goes: any publicity is good publicity.

http://www.lapresse.ca/le-soleil/act...ons-awards.php
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  #392  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2016, 10:44 PM
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Montréal likely to pass 10M visitor mark for 1st time by end of 2016.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montre...hina-1.3800027
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  #393  
Old Posted Oct 22, 2016, 3:46 PM
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  #394  
Old Posted Oct 24, 2016, 2:27 AM
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Obviously written by a former Montrealer!
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  #395  
Old Posted Oct 31, 2016, 9:39 PM
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Sault Ste. Marie recently released a video of the city. It's got some nice views of the downtown, the river, and the industrial area, if your into that kind of thing. It's more a business video but it can work for tourism too.

Edit: Tried to figure out how to get the video here using the YouTube button but I can't figure it out so here's the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNeg...ature=youtu.be
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  #396  
Old Posted Nov 1, 2016, 4:58 PM
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Here's a new Hamilton promo video...

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It's the follow up to 2013's "The Ambitious City" promo...
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Here's a new promotional video for Hamilton. It is aimed at not re-branding, but renewing Hamilton's image as the is The Ambitious City. After the video was released, #HamOnt was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in every major Canadian city.

Video Link
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  #397  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2017, 4:01 PM
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This one is pretty well done.

How to enjoy St. John's like a local

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This is one of the best destinations in Canada, a city with a real sense of place. The setting is magnificent, the people remarkable and the food scene is getting better all the time. Toss in gorgeous houses in colours that would make a rainbow envious and you've got a remarkable, one-of-a-kind city.

Here's a look at how to enjoy St. John's like a local.

The walk along The Battery area of St. John's might be the finest urban walk in the world; with sensational views of the city and the harbour.
http://m.en.canoe.com/Travel/Canada/.../22751887.html

The recommendations are all good, except Ches'. Everyone here knows it's awful but it's just... Our version of Tim Horton's coffee. It's just what you do and if you never learn any better...
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  #398  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2017, 4:49 PM
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Has tourism in the West taken a hit from all the fires this year? BC has bore the brunt of the actual fire, but Alberta has been quite smoky this summer.
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  #399  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2017, 8:53 PM
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I can't remember where I read it but yes BC has definitely seen a decent hit. I'll see if I can find the article.
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  #400  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2017, 9:05 PM
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'The best since Expo 67': Tourist numbers rise this year in Montreal


By the end of the year, more than 11 million tourists will have spent $3.6 billion in the Montreal region, according to an estimate prepared by the Conference Board of Canada for Tourisme Montreal released on Tuesday.

“It was a marvellous year, the best since Expo 67,” said Pierre Bellerose, the vice-president of the non-profit tourism promotion agency.

The agency said tourism numbers were up across the board — with more people crossing the border from the United States and an increase in airline passenger traffic. In total, Tourisme Montreal said the number of international visitors to the city was up by six per cent.

“We have overall growth from all destinations, we have growth from specific markets, like the Mexican market and the Chinese market, and growth for a lot of our attractions and festivals,” Bellerose said.

The agency says the number of visitors from Mexico rose by 119.3 per cent, while the number of visitors from China was up 32.1 per cent.


SOURCE: Montreal Gazette
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