Lounging in someone else's hammock

The afternoon catches up with us, and the warm sunshine finds my lying in someone else's red hammock, under a tree beside the Montmorency River, about 15km from Québec City. After a morning avoiding my hangover exploring Québec City on foot, I met up with Kari and Vincent for my second breakfast. On their suggestion, we've driven out of the city to be beside the river, just upstream from precipitous Montmorency Falls. Kari and Vincent are out sun bathing on the rocks, I'm happily reading the newspaper and writing postcards here in the shade. It's by reading Kari's Lonely Planet guidebook to Peru that I am offered this hammock. A South American man is stretching on the rocks when he sees it and I tell him about Kari's forthcoming holiday. He goes to introduce her to his Peruvian friends, and I doze in the gently rocking hammock.

After an hour or two in the sunshine we divert for an ice cream and to look down on the waterfalls from the footbridge that is slung almost directly above the drop. More than twenty metres taller than Niagara Falls, these crashing foaming chutes of water drop seventy-six metres to the St. Lawrence River below. Kari discovers I have vertigo, but I take a few photographs by standing as close to the middle of the bridge as possible, and by holding my camera out as far as I can. This slightly better view is afforded from round the corner of the hill, looking back towards the falls...

A little later we drive back to the city, via a loyal pit stop at a Metro supermarket to get food for a barbeque outside the city. We pass the evening with friends of Kari, including an ex-NHL hockey player and his friendly wife from Indiana. On the way home we agree to disagree on tastes in domestic architecture, and by twelve o'clock, I am lying face down, almost asleep, on the bed in Kari's apartment. I've had a great weekend, and owe 99% of it to the generosity and hospitality of friends... thank you :-)

I return to Montréal tomorrow...