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Family Travel with Colleen Kelly – Saguenay Lac St. Jean, Canada

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A fjord where beluga whales surface within sight of the highway sets up this family’s swing through Quebec’s Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean.

North of Quebec City, the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region gives host Colleen Kelly and her daughters a week built around water, forest, history, and a working zoo. The episode of “Family Travel with Colleen Kelly” moves from a whale-watching boat at the mouth of the Saguenay Fjord to a preserved 1920s mill town, then finishes with the girls filling in for zookeepers. It’s a tight itinerary, but each stop lines up with something specific the region is known for rather than a generic checklist of “things to do.”

• The family boards a boat tour at the point where the Saguenay Fjord meets the St. Lawrence River to spot beluga, minke, and fin whales in the wild.
• They combine a stop at the Musée du Fjord in La Baie with an introductory sailing outing and a ropes-and-zipline circuit at Parc Aventures Cap Jaseux in Saint-Fulgence.
• The trip closes with a “zookeeper for a day” program at Zoo Sauvage de Saint-Félicien, where Kelly and her children help prepare animal meals and weigh a resident camel, following a stop at the 1920s mill town of Val-Jalbert.

Fjord and River Confluence

The Kellys start on the water, at the confluence where the Saguenay Fjord empties into the St. Lawrence River — a stretch marine biologists have long treated as a feeding ground rather than a passage-through. On the boat tour, the family gets close looks at beluga whales, along with minke and fin whales working the same waters. It’s the kind of sighting that doesn’t require a offshore expedition; the fjord’s depth and cold currents pull the whales in close to shore, which is exactly why this launch point has become the region’s signature excursion.

Hands-On Science and a First Sail

After the boat trip, the family heads to the Musée du Fjord in La Baie, where the exhibits are built around touching and testing rather than reading placards — the focus is the fjord’s navigable ecosystem and how a saltwater channel this far inland actually functions. From there, the girls try sailing for the first time on the fjord itself, a beginner-level outing meant to put visitors directly on the water they’d just been observing from a tour boat.

Kelly and her daughters go from watching beluga whales off the bow of a tour boat to steering their own sailboat on the same fjord within the same stretch of the trip.

Treetop Adventure at Cap Jaseux

Parc Aventures Cap Jaseux in Saint-Fulgence is where the trip shifts from water to air. The family works through the park’s aerial ropes courses and ziplines, obstacle tracks built for mixed-age groups rather than a single skill level, and the park is also known for its treetop accommodations for visitors who want to stay overnight in the canopy rather than just pass through it. Families looking for a similar mix of height and challenge on a trip elsewhere can find comparable setups covered in FIRST TIME BACKPACKER // Appalachian Trail // MY EXPERIENCE, though Cap Jaseux’s courses are built specifically with kids in mind.

Stepping Back to the 1920s in Val-Jalbert

The Historic Village of Val-Jalbert (Village historique de Val-Jalbert) is a former company mill town preserved as it stood in the 1920s, and costumed interpreters walk visitors through what daily life looked like for the families who worked and lived there when the pulp mill was still running. It’s the trip’s one indoor-history stop sandwiched between two outdoor, activity-driven days, giving the girls a break from ziplines and boats without losing the region’s throughline of showing rather than just telling.

A Day on the Zoo Staff

The episode ends at Zoo Sauvage de Saint-Félicien, where the family joins a behind-the-scenes “zookeeper for a day” program. Kelly and her children help prepare meals for the animals and work alongside staff on routine tasks, including weighing a resident camel — the kind of detail that makes the segment feel like real work rather than a staged photo op. It’s a fitting closer for a trip built on hands-on access, following the same pattern set by the fjord boat tour and the museum’s touch-based exhibits earlier in the episode.

This is one stop in Kelly’s ongoing run of regional profiles for the series — viewers who want the same family-first format applied to a very different landscape can check out her episode on Family Travel with Colleen Kelly – Dallas, Texas, filed under the show’s growing Family Travel catalog.