Take a trip with me....

How was I to know it was a time portal? 

I stepped into the glass box in 2025. I stepped out into the 1600s.

Snow was falling, thick and silent. The kind of snow that muffles sound and thought. The kind of snow that belongs to a different century. 

Shops were shuttered. Gas lamps flickered. Unfamiliar with Canadian ways, I didn't know everything shut down by 8pm on winter nights and found the streets empty and the shops and restaurants closed.

The cobblestones beneath my boots were slick and glinting like a trail of stars. The wind blew cold and hard, and the silence? It wasn’t modern silence. It was old and deep. The kind of silence that says the city itself is sleeping.

I was alone, a woman wandering the dark empty streets of a strange city in another country, but I wasn’t afraid. Not here.

Canada, for all its vastness, holds a certain stillness that feels like kindness. And that night, it felt like I was being watched over—not by security cameras or strangers, but by something older. 

I imagined my pioneer ancestors in their wool cloaks and heavy shoes, trudging through this same snow. I felt their spirits walking beside me. I didn’t need to see them to know they were there to guide and protect me.

With every creak of a shutter, every gust of wind, every lace curtained window—I moved through history, not memory. Candles flickered mysteriously in windows, when I looked directly at them, they were gone. I wasn’t visiting the past. I was in it.

When I looked back up the hill, the glowing track of the Funicular was gone and the dazzling chateau with it. Or maybe they were just hiding. Perhaps they were never there all, who is to say? 

That night, I didn’t need it to go back. I could have stepped through any doorway and stayed for I’d already arrived.

Time travel, as it turns out, doesn’t require a DeLorean or a wormhole. Sometimes it just needs cold air, quiet streets, and a moment when the past decides to let you in.

In case you’re wondering, yes—time travel is possible. You can take a ride on the Funicular, too. Transport back to a different century still exists. In old Quebec City, it costs exactly $5.00, Canadian. Step outside the fabulous Chateau de Frontenac and walk onboard the time machine.

No passport required.