We drove into Rimouski about 7:30PM. Neither of us had any idea where the Hotel L'Empress was so we decided to take a quick tour of the city. It was a quiet little town, most of the activity centered around the waterfront. As we drove down the main drag, Dianne was amazed at how much the town had changed in the thirty years since she last visited.

As it was getting late and we were exhausted, we stopped and asked where the hotel was. When we finally arrived, we wanted nothing more than to just go and flop down on our beds and go to sleep. But our troubles were far from over.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were informed that we had no reservations. Despite the fact that I had made them nearly a month before, it seems that a screw up on their part had put us at the Hotel Navigation, the sister hotel in downtown Rimouski. Neither Dianne nor I was about to accept this. Not only had they put us at the wrong hotel, but they had us arriving the next day! We told the desk clerk that there was no way we were staying at any other hotel. We had driven a long way to be there for the ceremony the next day and we were staying at the Hotel L'Empress. He said he had "one more room" but it was a luxury suite and could not give us the rate promised by the museum. Now, neither Dianne nor I have the type of personality that will just sit idly by and be pushed around. We chuckled and told him to call the owner of the hotel. He said he could not do so until the next day and that we would have to pay the rate as was for now. Dianne agreed but voiced her discontent and we made our way to the room.

The room was very large, with two large beds and a cavernous bathroom with a shower and a jacuzzi bath. The entire hotel was decorated in a nautical motif. The windows to all the outside doors were portholes, the stairs and hallways were lined with wooden ocean liner-style hand rails and pictures and paintings of Empress of Ireland were everywhere.

Dianne hopped in the shower and I made my way back down to the lobby to take some pictures. I found out at that point that Chris's reservations had been screwed up as well so I called him on his cell phone. He was less than pleased but after yelling at the desk clerk for a while, Chris and Edith managed to secure "the last room" (just like Dianne and I; hmmmmm).

Reservation problems aside, I found the Hotel L'Empress to be tastefully decorated in tribute to the Empress of Ireland disaster. They had a few plates and some silverware on display and the lobby featured many paintings of the ship and photos from the wreck. Returning to the room, I found Dianne watching a CNN special. I called my wife to let her know we had arrived and spent the next few hours wandering the halls of the hotel looking at the pictures. I also wandered into town a ways to see what was around. I quickly found that it gets cold after dark though and returned to the hotel.

Chris arrived about 1:00AM. I had heard them pull up from our hotel room and went down to meet him. Although it was the first time we had ever met in person, it felt more like seeing an old friend for the first time in a long while. Once he and Edith had their things up in their room, Edith went to sleep and Chris and I went down to the lobby to drink some beer and talk.