And that is always a blessing. After a restless night with high winds, trucks again starting up at 04:00 in the morning and diesel horns from locomotives at the level crossing about 2 miles away (you have no idea how far sound can travel in open countryside in the dead of night) I was back on the road (or, at least, the Chemin du Roy) again.
This is the kind of thing that I’m looking for – you can see in front of this house near Portneuf the low wall and flattened surface (the Chemin du Roy was a plank road made of cedar). The bits of gravel close to the camera and farther away behind give the game away a little and it’s nothing like as easy as this to find them normally.
Still, it all keeps me out of mischief, I suppose and it’s quite interesting as I keep on encountering all kinds of unexpected things while I’m on my travels.
Another thing I’ve been looking for is the site of Fort Jacques Cartier. It’s the last place in Nouvelle France that held out against the English.
Strangely enough though, there’s no mention of it anywhere and although I had the co-ordinates (which you can’t reach) there’s not a sign or anything, quite surprising when you consider just how militant Québec is. In fact if I hadn’t seen this bridge and its name, I would have been convinced that I had the co-ordinates totally wrong.
Into the city of Québec and past my beloved Tracel de Cap rouge which I’ve told you about before, and then into the city centre to take some photos that I missed when I was here last time – which you can see on the index page for the Tracel photos.
The Quebec Railway Station was high on my list of places to visit. The outside is magnificent, one of thse typical Nouvelle France fairytale buildings, but the interior is superb as you can see. It’s kept all of its splendour which makes a change, seeing as how normally allof this kind of stuff is swept away in a wave of vandalism as we saw in other places in the swinging 60s.
Strawberry Moose made a few friends in Québec too, but that quickly turned sour when someone called him a toutou. Definitely a
Tomorrow I’m leaving the St Lawrence because I have other fish to fry, and so I’ll head for the hills and an early night. See you all soon.
