… really bad night last night. Only on this occasion there wasn’t any particular reason for it. I was still awake at 02:00 this morning, which is not like me over here, is it? And worse still, I had no idea why that might have been.

I crawled under the shower and then made a coffee but I still didn’t feel much better.

Anyway, to wake myself up, I made myself another mug of coffee and went down to the harbour for a walk around and some fresh air.

And, strangely enough, this would have been quite a good place to have stayed for the night. There was plenty of space here and there were quite a few boats up on stocks. I could have tucked myself in here quite happily in the peace and quiet and been well away.

Still, you live and learn, don’t you?

Having fuelled up Strider, I set off again and after a good drive I pulled up on a rest area to admire the view and drink another coffee.

We’ve all seen this rock before haven’t we? It’s La Roche Percée, the Pierced Rock, and we came by here before. It’s said to be one of the hundreds of places where Jacques Cartier made a landing and erected a cross.

If he really did land at all of the places that are claimed as his landing sites, he would probably be still out there now, but this time it’s probably correct because no-one could invent a description of this particular site without having visited it and there isn’t another place that resembles this in the whole of the St Lawrence estuary.

I was away with the fairies for about an hour up here too in the lovely sunny late-morning, and then I set off again to continue my travels.

We’ve seen the town of Percé before and so I won’t trouble you with another photo of the town itself. The only thing that you need to remember is that half of the buildings are motels and the other half are tourist attractions.

But all of that notwithstanding, we certainly haven’t seen the town and the rock from this angle. And although you can’t see the hole in the rock, this is certainly the most exciting angle to view everything. But itwas quite an effort to take the photo. There’s nowhere to park except at the side of the road and there’s an endless stream of traffic up the hill.

We finally solve the mystery of the railway when we arrive at the town of Gaspé. All of the railway installations have been swept away and there’s a huge tourist information building constructed on the site.

And parked out at the back of it is the train here. We’ve seen dozens of locomotives like this and so I think that it might be one of the GP38 family, but I’ll need to check up on that.

The girl in charge of the tourist information office told me the story of the train, so now I can tell you all.

VIARAIL stopped running the trains to Montreal about 6 years ago and abandoned the line, so she said. It’s now a tourist scenic railway that runs just as far as Percé and back again in the summer months with no connection to the main line at Compbelltown, which should make life interesting if they ever need to replace the loco or send it away for repair.

But that’s not likely to happen as the service didn’t run this year. It seems that important work is needed to be done on the line but the Quebec Government hasn’t done it. “Maybe they’ll do it ready for next year” she said, and I’m not convinced that she believed it either.

The latest update on all of this is that Jean-François Turcotte told me “that was RS-18u 1849; it’s been trucked-out to the active portion of the line and is now used to haul woodchip, cement and windmill parts along with three other RS-18u’s. The carriages for the former l’Amiral tourist train are still in Gaspé, AFAIK.”

And Anthony Bernard Prince said ” A lot of track maintenance work will be carried out on the 3rd section of our railroad between Port-Daniel and Gaspé this year (2021). The majority of the work will be carried out between Chandler and Douglastown. 15,000 ties will be replaced, many crossings will be replaced, and thousands of tons of ballast will be spread.”

The town of Gaspé is a nightmare to negotiate as the whole road system is torn up for repair. I eventually made it to Tim Horton’s but didn’t stay long. Instead, I moved on and I’m now esconced at the site of the old World War II military defences for the bay. It’s a little-known fact that I had the UK fallen to the Germans in World War II, the Royal Navy would have come and set themselves up over here in the Gaspé.

And on the way out of Gaspé on the way to here here I drove past two motels that I hadn’t noticed in 2010. Where were they when I needed them?