Tag Archives: quebec

Thursday 21st September 2017 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish might recognise this bridge, because we’ve seen it before.

Back in 2010 in fact when we were on our way to Montreal and then Labrador.

It’s called the Thousand Islands Bridge, because there are a whole load of islands, maybe even a thousand, in the St Lawrence River just around here.

Back then, we saw the bridge from the Great Satan side of the river and you may well be surprised to learn that today, I am once more on the Great Satan side.

And it took all of my self control and restraint to do it too.

This morning I was up some time after the alarm went off and had a few things to do – such as a shower and to have breakfast, and to catch up on yesterday’s paperwork.

By 08:00 I was on my way, exactly as planned – something that surprised even me. I was decanted straight into the morning rush hour, but then that was only to be expected. While it is always a disappointment to be held up like this, I had made due allowance.

Once I’d cleared the rush-hour traffic, which took 50 minutes to clear 10 kilometres, I was able to bowl along quite rapidly.

Flying down Highway 40 I went past several villages that I had previously not noticed.

So which one of these is your favourite village? St Zotique? St Polycarpe? Or St Telesphore? They don’t half have some weird names for some of the villages in Quebec.

But there again, Quebec is a very strange place, as you might already have discovered.

It’s about 350 kilometres from where I was staying to Kingston in Ontario.

And despite having stopped for fuel and a coffee, and taking a little detour around the old canal on the edge of town I was in Kingston for just after 12:00.

That was well in advance of my appointment and so I was able to go for a little walk around the town – and make a decision that it’s one of those places that I will have to come back to visit when I have more time.

And here is Sandra, making the acquaintance of Strawberry Moose.

And while that was going on, let me tell you a story.

My Great Grandfather was a soldier who served in the Wiltshire Regiment in India and South Africa and fought in the Boer War. But some time in the early years of the 20th Century he and his family emigrated to Canada and lived in Montreal.

He enlisted in World War I despite being well over age, and presumably died of wounds because his body is in the Military Cemetery at Mount Royal under a military headstone, despite not dying until the early 1920s.

His wife hated Canada, the cold, and all of that and so as soon as her husband was buried, she was on the next boat back to London.

They had several kids and the youngest kids, one of whom was my grandmother, returned to the UK with their mother.

A couple of the older children were by this time married and they remained behind with their own families. And when I was looking into the military history of my great grandfather I came across Sandra, who is the grand-daughter of one of the older children who remained in Canada.

And so she’s my cousin at several times removed.

As you know, this may well be the last time that I shall be in North America, and I’ve been doing all of the things that I’ve been meaning to do.

Meeting up with Sandra was high on my list, and so here we were, in Kingston, having lunch together and swapping family histories.

After lunch I headed off to Great Satan. And we had the usual border confrontation with a rude, ignorant security guard, who demanded to know what I was laughing at.

They really must trawl the Government Services to find the most unpleasant civil servants, and put them in these immigration booths

However, the guy in the office was quite pleasant and polite, and here I am.

But why am I here? You might well ask.

As I said just now, there are several tasks that I want to perform and several people whom I want to see before I go back to Europe – one person in particular whom I haven’t seen since 2005.

So here I am in the Rodeway Motel on the edge of Syracuse in New York State, conveniently placed on the side of Interstate 81.

From here, Strider, Strawberry Moose and I have about 1,000 miles to go and it’s going to take a couple of days to get there because I’m not able to go as fast as I used to.

It will give him enough time to head for the hills, otherwise he might be getting a surprise visit in two or three days time.

Tuesday 19th September 2017 – HAVING BEEN …

… out like a light during the evening, I found it difficult to drop off to sleep last night. Long after midnight and I was still trying to drop off.

When I finally did drop off, it was a difficult night with tossing and turning and all of that, and it was a struggle to leave the bed when the alarm went off.

But leave the bed I did and after breakfast and a little work on the laptop, I was out on the road by 09:30.

First disappointment was at the docks. There were a couple of big ships in there but there were road works, the bridge across the canal was out of order and, try as I might, I couldn’t find my way out there.

In the end I gave it up as a bad job and headed out of town.

First stop has of course to be our famous Tracel de Cap Rouge out on the edge of town.

Tracel is of course a French word and it’s where the English word “trestle” come from.

And this is probably the most magnificent trestle railway bridge in the whole of North America, even if it is made of iron and not of wood.

Cap Rouge is said to be the site of the first permanent settlement in North America.

In an effort to establish themselves in the New World in competition with the Spanish And Portuguese, the French sent colonists here in 1541.

However scurvy and what has been enigmatically described as “deteriorating relations with the natives” led to the surviving settlers being recalled to France.

There was a road – the Chemin du Roy – which was the first public highway in Nouvelle France, running between Quebec and Montreal.

I spent a good while over the years tracing its original route although much has been lost to modernisation and coastal erosion.

I never found an original plan of the route, but my assumption is that the road hugged the coast around here, somewhere along the line of tbat footpath.

Like I said, coastal erosion did for a lot of the original route.

You can see here where the official sign (which don’t necessarily follow the route, but never mind) points off to the right, but there’s a nice straight road ahead.

That disappears off down there and comes to a sudden stop at the bank in the bend of a river.

Yes, don’t count on the official signs.

The Chemin du Roy is signposted to follow the highway which is to the left of the photo just here

But when you see the orientation of this traditional Quebec cottage and the pathway that passes in front of it, it’s easy to imagine where the original trace of the Chemin might have been.

One of the things that we do when we are driving around is to look for proper football pitches.

They are quite common these days but when I first started coming to Canada they were few and far between.

This is the first one that I ever noticed – in Neuville – and access to photograph it was always difficult. But today, for some reason, it wasn’t a problem to go down there and photograph it properly.

A little earlier I talked about road alignments along the Chemin du Roy.

The area around Donnacona has been badly hit by coastal erosion and so tracing the original route is quite difficult.

But seeing a house orientated in this fashion with the trace of a track running past the front of a house, it’s easy to imagine where the original course might have been.

And here we had a moment of excitement.

As I pulled up here, I noticed an old guy peeking out at me from his window across the road. And he walked out onto his porch for a closer look.

“Are you having a problem with this?” I shouted across to him. He turned tail and walked back into his house.

When you see on an old map a street called “rue du Station”, you have to go to investigate … “well, one of us does” – ed.

I wasn’t expecting much because if you think that the Beeching cuts in the UK were severe, they were absolutely nothing compared to what happened to the railway network in Canada.

There are a few freight lines still operating, but passenger service outside the major cities has gone more-or-less completely. There’s nothing here in the former “rue du Station” to indicate what might have been a railway station.

But this is much more like it, isn’t it?

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen one of these before in 2010 when we were in Goose Bay.

And here’s another one – a Bombardier “Auto-Neige” from the late 1930s, I reckon.

It’s for sale too, and if I had room in my suitcase this would be coming back to Europe with me because I think that it’s gorgeous.

On the two occasions that I’ve been to Deschambault I’ve been soaked with rain and I’ve never been able to photograph the town properly.

One of the places that I came here today to look for was the Ile Richelieu. The navigable channel up the St Lawrence is quite narrow here and there are rocks and rapids and the island was the icing on the cake for any defensive force.

The French built a fort out there on the island to control the passage upriver but a combination of a rolling fog, a very high tide and a strong wind enabled a British fleet to slip by and on to Montreal before the French could bring their guns into action.

Deschambault regularly appears in lists of the most beautiful villages in Quebec and it’s a listing that isn’t undeserved. That building over there is, believe it or not, the Town Hall

It’s not the only building in the place that’s in that particular “North American ante-bellum” style. The convent (every town worth its salt in Quebec has to have its convent) is also in the same style.

In our quest to fill out the missing gaps in the Chemin du Roy I’d seen an old track away by the Moulin de la Chevrotiere that would correspond with what I knew about the original trace of the route

I went to have a look, and I could identify ditches that resembled those that Becancour and Lanouiller – the architects – had specified for the sides of the road, and the stones of the type that they had specified to be placed in the marshy parts of the roadway.

We are told that at Grondines there’s a huge submarine electric cable that runs underneath the St Lawrence

This takes electricity from the Lower St Lawrence hydro plants (such as the Manic and Outardes complexes) over and into the USA.

There’s no visible trace of the cable from what I’ve been able to find, but this “Hydro Quebec” transmission post just outside the town might give us a clue as to where the cable might disappear into the earth.

If the village of Grondines has any claim to fame, it might be for its windmill.

When a Peace Treaty was signed with the Iroquois and the land was subsequently parcelled out to the local gentry – the Seigneurie System – one of the duties of the Seigneur was to provide a mill for the peasantry to grind their corn.

A water mill wouldn’t be much good on a slow-flowing river because the river would be frozen up for four months per year.

A great many windmills were thus erected by some of the Seigneurs, several of which survive today.

I arrive at Trois Rivieres just in time to be caught in the rush-hour traffic. And seeing as there are major roadworks in the town I reckon that I lose a good hour of my time.

I have to hit the Highway instead and arrive in Berthierville just as the light is starting to go.

Berthierville was the home of Formula One racing driver Gilles Villeneuve and it’s another place that I’ve always managed to miss while I’ve been out and about on my travels.

But today I make a determined effort and actually manage to track it down this year.

One last thing to do, and that’s in Repentigny down the road.

That’s to track down the hideously modern Church of Our Lady of the Fields – Notre Dame des Champs.

I’ve absolutely no idea what the designer of the church – Roger D’Astous – must have been smoking when he was drawing up the plans, but he’s managed to produce something that is so hideous that it’s almost attractive.

By now I’m running extremely late and there’s no chance of reaching Montreal tonight. But there’s a motel down the road that’s very tired and very shabby – and also very cheap.

They do me an excellent deal on the room, which is very good news, and I celebrate by having a shower and washing my clothes.

Pasta, mushrooms and tomato sauce make a nice meal, and then I crash out while working on the laptop.

I’m definitely beginning to feel the pace now.

Monday 18th September 2017 – WELL THAT WAS …

… something of a wash-out.

I’d come to Quebec mainly to do some research at the University of Laval, but I abandoned round by lunchtime.

I was going to say that I’d had a good night’s sleep but I’d had a very bad attack of cramp in the night – I’ve been having a few of these again just recently.

So a nice early start with coffee and porridge made in the microwave, and then a pile of paperwork to prepare things. And then I hit the road.

Reaching the University was one thing – finding where I was going was something else. I ended up going up a one way street the wrong way – twice! And through a red traffic light too.

Parking is weird there too – you either pay for an hour or for a day. There’s no in-between., and it isn’t cheap either. I can’t help feeling that there’s someone making an awful lot of money out of parking fees.

In the reception, a couple of helpful people at reception pointed me on my way to the library, and there, a very helpful lady helped me find what I needed – none of this incestuous academia like at Cambridge a few years ago.

Why I was here was in respect of a researcher by the name of Thomas Edward Lee.

An author by the name of James Enterline had written a book in the early 70s with a well-thought-out but very flaky argument about the Norse presence in Ungava Bay in the north of Quebec.

He had quoted Lee as one of his sources, but Lee’s works weren’t in the mainstream. The Centre of Nordic Studies at the University of Laval had funded his research and I had discovered that they till held his thesis.

And so I came here to read it.

And, as I said, it was a disappointment.

Lee, being aware of Enterline’s arguments, succeeds in undermining, if not demolishing them. But his own excavations at Pomiok Island are disappointing.

He’s sure that he has found a Norse Longhouse here, but his conclusions are based on coincidence rather than any hard discovery. The only substantial artefact – a Norse iron axe-head – wasn’t discovered by him but handed to him by an Inuit who had apparently found it many years earlier. And so its provenance could not even be verified.

The net result of all of Lee’s labours that he incited a great deal of discussion amongst his peers, and his funding was stopped.

I wasn’t impressed by his confrontational and polemic style of dialogue either. It struck me as being most un-Academic.

As a result, I decided to abandon my research, thinking that he couldn’t really tell me anything concrete about the Norse presence in Ungava.

At the end of the day, it was difficult to decide how much of Lee’s funding issues had been due to the inconclusive nature of his discoveries, how much was due to the un-academic manner of presentation, and how much was due to the confrontational, polemic style of his debate with his peers

Lunch was next on the agenda and so I removed myself to the Parc des Braves.

I had a list of things that needed doing on the north shore of the St Lawrence – a list that has been current since 2013 – and so I decided to attack that.

Especially as the Parc des Braves was included thereupon. I’m not sure how I had managed to miss that out before.

If, like me, you were educated in the 1960s you would have received the same kind of Empire-building jingo that I had had.

And we were taught that the UK always won, and came through every test with flying colours.

And the magnificent victory on the Plains of Abraham that General Wolfe had had, which had won French North America for the British crown.

I was even in “Wolfe” House in my primary school.

But that is, unfortunately, far from the truth.

It’s certainly true that the British had beaten the French at Quebec and occupied the city, but the fighting was far from over.

A French relief force had set out from Montreal and engaged the British in Battle at Saint-Foy, right where we are standing – and defeated them soundly.

The British retreated behind the walls of the Citadel of Quebec and the siege was on.

And had it been a French fleet that had been the first to break through the ice on the St Lawrence in the following Spring to reach the city, not a British one, the History of Quebec would have been very, very different.

And, of course, we were taught nothing about this at school as it didn’t fit in with the image of the Powerful All-Mighty UK (or “England” as we were taught then).

One thing left to do – and that was to go to find the Ursuline Convent – something else that I had spectacularly overlooked when I was here last.

Finding a parking space was, as usual, the issue in Old Quebec, but we soon come across more of this religious hypocrisy here.

We’ve seen so much of this on our travels – not just in North America – and you’re all probably very tired of me drawing your attention to it.

But whatever happened to the Forgiveness of Sins, or of Turning The Other Cheek, or Giving All That Thou Hast To The Poor.

There’s nothing whatever in the Bible about the towing away of offenders.

The Ursulaines – three of them – came over here in the 1èth Century to give instruction and education to the girls of the city – in the same way that Marguerite Bourgeoys did in Montreal round about the same time.

And the education part is still continuing, as you can tell, because I seem to have arrived round about chucking-out time and there are brats everywhere.

And you can tell what kind of school it is simply by looking at the clothes worn by the girls.

It’s the fashion in North America for exclusive private schools to dress their girls in plaid. And the more plaid, the more exclusive the school.

Here, they are wearing full-length plaid smocks. You don’t get more exclusive than this.

And the mothers picking up their daughters in their expensive Porsche Carreras is another sign of exclusivity too.

Somehow, you get the feeling that here at the Ursuline Convent and the Ursuline School, the message of Jesus Christ has has become extremely distorted.

I bet that Mother Marie of the Incarnation, the original founder of the Institution here in Quebec, is turning in her grave.

When I was here for my mega-ramble in 2012, this particular Square was fenced off and undergoing a great deal of renovation.

I was therefore extremely curious to see what had become of it and so I directed myself here.

And I wasn’t disappointed. They seem to have made a very fine job of it and I was quite impressed. I like the laurels particularly – and the fountain.

On the way back to my motel I stopped off at a “Maxi” Supermarket for some soya milk. And ended up with a few other things too, including Spruce Beer and also some grapes at 89 cents a pound – which didn’t last long.

Back here, another couple was moving in next door and they took quite a liking to Strawberry Moose.

But here’s a thing.

When was the last time that I crashed out? I mean – seriously?

It all caught up with me yesterday afternoon. I started to yawn at about 16:30 and that’s all that I remember until 21:00 when I found myself fully-dressed under the bedclothes with the internet radio blaring away. I was gone for good by the looks of things.

It took me a while to come round, but I still managed to make tea – and then I was gone again.

Mind you, I’m not surprised that it’s caught me up. I’ve been going at quite a pace just recently and something had to give.

Sunday 17th September 2017 – THAT WASN’T …

… a very successful night at all.

Nothing wrong with the room or with the bed – but there’s a light aluminium porch thing over the door to the room and the force of the torrential downpour that started at about 03:00 and cascading onto the porch put paid to any thoughts that I might have had about sleeping.

But I must have been asleep at some time because I was away on my travels again during the night. We were back with the cars again during the night, and back where we were a while ago with three cars all of which should not have been on the road for one reason or other. One of them was my green Vanden Plas 1300 with its collapsed floor, but worse than that, when you switched on the wipers and the lights, it took five minutes for them to warm up before they would work. And so I set out one evening in the driving rain, switched on the lights and wipers and, as usual, nothing happened. But the rain was teeming down so fast I couldn’t see, so I was obliged to stop at the side of the road. And with no lights, this was an extremely dangerous thing to do. It put the wind up me so much that once we were on our way I rolled it down the hill into town and left it there, and walked back to tell everyone what I had done. It hit me only then that leaving the car there with no tax, people are bound to notice it and if I go down to retrieve my possessions later, someone is likely to call the police to say that I’m stealing things, and this is all going to become very uncomfortable.

I was out of the motel fairly promptly and down the road in the direction of Forestville.

The road down to the shore was closed for repair and so a diversion was posted.

And thanks to the diversion I discovered much more about the town. There were parts of the town that I certainly didn’t know existed – such as the church which I hadn’t seen before.

It’s a much bigger town than I ever thought before.

But here I had a disappointment.

There’s a ferry across the St Lawrence from here to Rimouski and it’s one that I haven’t taken before. But I won’t be able to take it today.

Today is the day that it changes schedule from three crossings per day instead of two, and the 11:30 crossing was cancelled. Next sailing is at 17:30 and I have far too much to do to wait around.

Instead, I went to the supermarket which was open for some more salad stuff and the like – stocks are running low here.

Next stop on the road was at Les Escoumins.

I’ve driven through here on several occasions but I’ve never actually stopped for a look around. And this was something that I was hoping to put right today.

And so instead of the new main road, I took the older road that runs into town.

Despite the miserable, depressing wet weather, I went out to the headland at the mouth of the river.

The cross that is there is quite significant. It relates to an event that took place in the early 17th Century when the earliest Christian missionaries arrived here amongst the Innu.

They found that a cross had already been erected on this spot. How it had come to be here was a mystery.

It is known that Jacques Cartier, on his voyages here in the 16th Century, erected crosses wherever he landed on the shore, but there was no record of his having placed one here.

From where we had parked there was an excellent view across the bay to the town.

Or, at least, there would have been had the weather not been so gruesome.

But thinking on, I’d been lucky with the weather up to date. I can only remember one other day of miserable weather when I’ve been on my travels – that day in Western Newfoundland.

On the western edge of the town, the road has been realigned too.

You can see where the modern alignment goes, off up there to the right. The older alignment is over there to the left.

And I remember that we have been up there on one occasion and took a photograph of the view back down here. And the weather was much better then too.

There was just one more place to visit, and that was out at the back of town.

There’s a waterfall here and that’s quite attractive, but back in the olden days there was a mill here that made use of the water power.

The river is an important salmon river and so there was a salmon ladder and all that kind of thing here but since the mill has gone, so has everything else.

The river has reverted to its natural state.

No prizes for guessing where I am now.

I didn’t get my ferry crossing across the St Lawrence earlier, and so that means that I get the ferry crossing across the entrance to the Saguenay Fjord.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have crossed over on this ferry on several previous occasions.

And so we all pile aboard and await the signal to be off. The ship that we are sailing on is the Jos Deschenes.

Owned by the Quebec government, she was named after a Montreal taxi-driver who refused to accept a couple of English-speaking tourists and made them walk to the airport.

For this major act of defiance, he was honoured by the Quebec authorities.

You are probably wondering why there isn’t a bridge across here these days, seeing that bridges have been erected almost everywhere else.

The fact is that the fjord is an important shipping lane and if you were with us in April 2012 as we drove up the fjord, you would have seen the sizeof the ships that go up there

And the site here is so constrained that it’s not possible for any bridge built here to have sufficient clearance for the larger ships to pass underneath.

I’m running incredibly late for my lunch. It’s well after 14:00 now in fact.

I’m heading for the docks at St Simeon – that’s my preferred lunch stop today. And as I round one of the bends in the road, I can see it over there.

And unless I’m very much mistaken, the weather seems to be clearing. If I’m not careful, I might even find the rain stopping in a moment.

We’ve been here a few times, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall. We’ve even stayed here a few times in the past.

There’s a beautiful quayside here with an excellent view of the town and it’s just the ideal place for me to sit and eat my butties.

I was right about the weather. The rain has eased off, but there’s still a roaring wind and there’s quite a rough sea running.

Talking of seas, when was the last time that we had a Ship of the Day? Goose Bay and the Fairlane if I remember correctly.

But today, steaming … “dieseling” – ed …down the St Lawrence towards the open sea we have an ideal candidate.

She’s too far out for me to read the name, which is a pity, but with the telephoto lens I can pull out a really good shot of her as she goes by.

On the way back round again I take a diversion off Highway 138 to go to visit the sleepy little village of Port au Persil.

I’d passed briefly through here on one of my many trips through the Charlevoix but I’d never actually stopped for a look around.

This was another one of the things that I wanted to put right today, even though the weather was not on my side.

While I was walking around the old harbour, I fell in with a couple of English people who had come here in a hire car from Toronto. We had a little chat while I admired the view of the little harbour.

I was right about the view of the place too. It’s a really pretty little village even in the miserable weather.

And I was lucky that the photos actually came out so well given the conditions. They could have been much worse than this.

By the time that I’d done the lap around the back of the Charlevoix, the weather had improved dramatically.

My first stop was at Baie St Paul, because, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall, we’d come here last time and witnessed a large building burning to the ground.

I was keen to see what had happened to the site.

In actual fact, the site has been cleared and a huge hotel complex, the Hotel Le Germain, has been built on the site.

It’s an incredibly upmarket hotel by the looks of things – you can tell this from the noise that the hotel makes about its “free parking” – as if that’s something of a novelty.

Which it probably is in a hotel of this style.

And by the looks of things, the Charlevoix tourist train makes a call here too.

I’m actually looking for the sea – or rather river-front.

I’ve never actually made it to here and that’s another thing that I wanted to do, because I have a special reason for being here

But first, we can sit here and admire the beautiful day, because the weather has now changed dramatically and I’m in shirt sleeves now.

And this is the reason why I’m here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here in April 2012 we had seen an abandoned goelette beached here.

We’d tried to reach it back then, but we were confounded by a high tide and a running river.

But this year, I’ve timed my arrival correctly and found another was across the dunes and the river.

And it looks as if my efforts are only just in time. Because there’s not all that much of her left.

Even in the five and a half years since I was here last, she’s taken some battering and there’s not all that much of her left.

Goelettes were small but very sturdy sailing cargo ships (although this one seems to have been motorised) and carried out the coastal trade along the St Lawrence.

The road network is comparatively recent in eastern Quebec and the only way to move about back in those days was by sea.

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of these goelettes going up and down the river from port to port delivering goods and transporting people, but today there wan’t behalf a dozen left.

Climbing over Cap Tourmente towards Quebec there’s the most incredible view behind me of a hanging cloud hovering over the valley where Baie St Paul is situated.

There’s too much traffic for me to leave the vehicle to photograph it, but by judicious use if the hard shoulder and the rear-view mirror I do the best that I can.

And I’m quite pleased about how this has turned out.

Just one more photograph before we arrive in Quebec City.

It’s quite out of focus and distorted but it was taken though the windscreen of a moving Strider of an object moving towards up in wicked light.

But it’s really quite an exciting photograph because it’s a diesel multiple-unit heading towards us on the Charlevoix Tourist Line.

So what’s happening here then? This isn’t what I was expecting to see at all.

Due to the loss of light and confusion at the road works, I’m at the wrong motel in Quebec.

This is the first one that I ever visited and where the story about Quebec showers comes from.

Nothing has changed either, and we even have the same landlady. But she’s done me an excellent price for the two nights that I’m staying here and there’s a fridge and a microwave in the room.

What with one thing and another, I’ve not yet bought an evening meal since I’ve been on the road. With the slow cooker for when there’s no microwave, I’ve been self-catering for all the time that I’ve been here.

And isn’t that a pleasant change?

Saturday 16th September 2017 – THAT WAS …

… a much better sleep last night. There was a little movement around from a few of my fellow guests but nothing that seriously disturbed me.

Mind you, talking about being disturbed, I was disturbed enough on my travels though. We were walking through Crewe around Manor Way, a few of us, and my mother was there with us. We ended up for some reason going down Birchin Lane in Nantwich and my mother suddenly had one of her “turns”. She crept up to a semi-detached house and loitered around the door – and when the old woman came out stalked her for a while before pouncing. She succeeded in persuading this woman that they had been girls together in 1939, although my mother hadn’t visited this area by 1939. But then, that kind of thing never worried my mother. She lived on a different planet to the rest of us.
Later, I was helping someone move house. We were down in the cellar sorting out stuff to go in the back of my red Cortina estate to move, so some stuff we were taking and other stuff, which the girl who owned the house here could take in her car, we left. A while later I was back with another woman and she was having a look around, seeing the nice wooded floor but a load of car tyres cut horizontally in half and embedded in the wooden floor stopped things touching the wall. She was horrified by this but I explained that they were only temporary and they would be moved once we were straightened out.

The landlady wasn’t there at breakfast, but I had company in the shape of an Indian couple and their little boy. We had quite a chat.

Having packed Strider, I checked his oil, put 5 litres of fuel in out of a can (just enough to keep him going) and set off for town.

Up to the Walmart car park, not for shopping, but for the obligatory photograph.

This is one that we always seem to be taking – of the water tower here in Labrador City. It goes to prove that I was actually here

Not all here though, as many people have commented in the past.

And in the quest for the perfect pitch, as you might say, here’s yet another football pitch.

Even Labrador City can boast a football pitch these days, and that’s certainly progress.

We seemed to have had all kinds of difficulties finding football pitches in Canada in the past and I remember my reaction when I found my first one. Now we seem to be finding them everywhere.

About 20 kilometres outside the town is the border between Labrador and Quebec.

And it always makes me smile because on the Labrador side, we have the Canadian flag, the Newfoundland and Labrador flag, the Union Jack and the Labrador flag.

Here on the Quebec side, there is just the Quebec flag.

You’ve all heard all of these stories of this Quebec “monolingual” policy, and you’ve all seen enough evidence to show that it’s just window dressing and sabre-rattling by the Quebec Government – nothing more than that.

Here’s an official Quebec Government road sign about 100 metres inside the Quebec border.

That’s not monolingual, of course, and it tells you all that you need to know about this “monolingual” policy.

We go into the town of Fermont for fuel. It’s about 2O kms closer to Baie Comeau than Labrador City, and that’s extremely important.

Fermont is a mining town created to house the employees of the huge Mont Wright iron mine just a couple of miles down the road.

and its claim to fame is that I reckon that it’s the coldest place on earth, and totally windswept. It’s punishment to stand outside here

If you look in the background to the left and see the light brown building, that’s where everything happens in Fermont.

All of the shops and offices are in there, and there are apartments above. That means that the people don’t have to step outside in order to carry out their activities.

Of course, though, the town has considerably expanded since that was built.

I mentioned that Fermont was a company town for the workers at the huge Mont Wright iron mine.

And if you are looking for “Mont Wright” – that’s it, that hole in the ground. So much ore has been extraced that the mountain has gone and they are now working in the surrounding areas.

Originally owned by the Quebec Cartier Mining Company, it’s now operated by Arcelor Mittal, the world’s biggest steel producer.

The mine here covers an area of 24km² and has enough ore to last until at least 2045.

The ore is taken to the crushing plant that you can see in the background.

The ore contains about 38% of iron concentrate and when the concentrate is separated, it’s shipped to Sept Iles on the company’s railway line for shipping onwards.

There’s only one way to come here by road, and that’s on Highway 389 from Baie-Comeau.

It’s 564 kilometres in length, and I do have to say that there’s about 200 kilometres – in two separate stretches – that ranks as about the worst road in the world.

You wouldn’t believe it possible, given the traffic that is obliged to come up here.

And furthermore, according to Provincial legislation, road trains are permitted to use the Highway too.

That’s all very well, but it’s not such good news if you happen to be stuck behind one. They bowl along pretty well on the asphalt highway, but on these roads they can hardly move at all.

and the amount of dust and stones that they throw up is astonishing

Having said all of that about the road and how miserable is its condition, it’s still magnificent all the same.

And in the right weather and in the right vehicle such as Strider it’s quite a beautiful road to drive.

Even though the autumn has yet to arrive, the colours of the plants up here in the Pays d’En Haut are superb all the same.

Over the last couple of years, the iron ore mine at Fire Lake has restarted full production.

The ore-bearing rock is blasted out, loaded into the dumpers and tipped into wagons pulled by the company’s locomotives.

These take it to the crusher up the road at Mont Wright where the concentrate is extracted. The ore here is said to be even richer than the ore at Mont Wright.

Next stop is the abandoned town of Gagnon – and in particular, the airstrip.

The reason why the airport is of interest is that the town was abandoned in 1985 when the iron mine was exhausted and yet the airstrip is in pristine condition with not a weed growing anywhere.

Given the speed at which arctic willow grows, it’s clear that someone is maintaining this airport in this condition,
but for why I really don’t know.

But it’s certainly weird.

Anything that you will ever read about the town will tell you that all that remains of the town is the highway and the airstrip.

That, of course, is total nonsense. Someone probably drove through here quickly without stopping and made a brief note.

And everyone else ever since has done a simple “copy/paste” of the original comments without ever taking the trouble to check

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have found the cemetery – which despite whatever you read, is still extant.

We always pass by to pay our respects to the inhabitants, because it’s quite evident that no-one else ever comes here to pay their respects.

As I have said, everyone else doesn’t even know that the cemetery here at Gagnon still exists.

Last time that we were here we noticed the small graves outside the precincts of the cemetery, and a list of burials marked anonyme.

You may remember that I speculated that they might be the graves of unbaptised children

Having a bit of a rummage around, I found a couple of headstones in this part of the cemetery.

They follow the lines of this tombstone here – a baby born and died on the same day in 1969. It seems that I may well be right in my supposition.

But it’s astonishing that there are so many of these anonyme graves. I reckon that it’s not far short of half of them.

But I have to laugh at the dual carriageway here. It’s the only section of dual carriageway in the entire length of Highway 389.

The irony is that it was built for the town of Gagnon long before Highway 389 was ever proposed, and by the time the Highway arrived here, the town had been abandoned for several years.

And despite it being asphalted, it’s probably worse than some of the dirt sections of road.

I find a beautiful place to stop and eat my lunchtime butties.

Being Pisces I have to be close to water and this will do me fine – overlooking one of the thousands of rivers that thread their way through Upper Quebec – the Pays d’En Haut.

And with the telephoto lens, I can take a good photograph of it stretching away into the distance.

Back on the road again and I intend to make it more-or-less non-stop to Baie Comeau.

Our road threads through the hills of Northern Quebec in the early autumn just as the leaves are changing colour.

I could show you dozens of photographs of the road, but just one will suffice. You’ll need to imagine the rest of them, because they are all as beautiful as this one.

Mind you, it might not look like this for much longer – the road, I mean.

As you can see, it’s not just a maintenance crew that we have here but they are doing some serious reconstruction.

And a little later on I encountered a lorry coming my way with an asphalt layer on the back. THat can only mean one thing …

We have to have a photo of the dam at Manic 5 – the 5th damo the river Manicouagan – to signal that we have arrived.

It’s not actually the 5th one but the fourth. Manic 4 was never built because they discovered that the lake behind Manic 3 would flood the potential site.

And it’s not officially called Manic 5 either but the Daniel Johnson Dam. He was the Government Minister sent to open it but he died in his sleep in the motel the night before the opening ceremony.

We push on and arrive in Vallant.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we came past in 2010 it was a ghost town. In 2014 it was slowly crawling awake.

In 2015 however there were dozens of trailer homes here for the work crews refurbishing the dams nearby.

But today, we have what look like permanent barracks in place of the trailers. It looks as if the place is settling down to some kind of permanence.

You might remember this road from last time too.

There was a very bad bend just here but in 2015 a work crew was busy blasting away a cutting through a rocky outcrop just here.

Today, we have a modern, high-speed section of the Highway. It’ll all look like this in 5 years time, I reckon.

At 564.3 kms the fuel warning light comes on on Strider. He’s done really well – more than 100 kms more than in previous years thanks to the rebuilt overdrive unit, and the road hasn’t been easy either as you can see.

I pull over and tip the rest of the fuel out of the can into his tank – about 12 litres I reckon, and that’s plenty to take me to Baie Comeau.

Having had motel “issues” in the past in Baie Comeau I drive through the town and out towards Quebec. In the past I’d seen a cheap motel right on the edge of town and so I went to give it a try.

After all of my vicissitudes with accommodation out in Labrador, this at least is a respectable price.

And I can use the slow cooker to make tea but I end up not eating it as I forgot it while I was talking to someone and the pasta congealed.

But a shower, a clothes wash and an Early night will set me up really well. I deserve it.

Friday 1st September 2017 – STRANGELY ENOUGH …

… that was the cheapest place where I’ve spent the night so far. And funnily enough, it was the best night’s sleep that I have had since I’ve been back on the road.

But although it was a better night than just recently, it still wasn’t what I would call ideal. I was still tossing and turning in my bed, although not as much as the last couple of nights.

Liz and Terry came to join me though – or, rather, I went to join them. They were moving house and had a couple of boys to help them – and the had done so well that there was only a couple of things in the garage underneath that needed to go. And I reckoned that if we planned it properly we could fit everything into the two vans and do it in one trip. Just then, as we were sitting thinking about it, some English couple (because we were abroad) were push-starting a car – a white-coloured car something like an ADO16 – down the hill at the side. The woman behind the wheel couldn’t control it on the bed and it came round and collided with the side of Liz and Terry’s house, which was made of metal (well, quite!). This is the kind of thing that would happen just before the new owners were coming to take possession. So Liz went out to attend to them. I went off into town to do something and on the way back the town was thronging with school kids being kicked out of school. There was a loudspeaker announcement about the end-of-year results (hence them hanging around) and they started to announce the names of the pupils who had done exceptionally well and had earned a reward. Back at Liz and Terry’s, it seemed that Liz was disappointed about something. “I bet they’ll argue about the time” she said, presumably referring to the people who had collided with the house. “What time do you say that it happened,” she asked me. “16:15” I said confidently. “Well there you are” replied Liz. “At least you agree with me”.

The alarm went off at 06:00 as usual and so did I. in fact, I awoke again with quite a start at 06:11 and only just made it out of bed before Billy Cotton’s strident summons at 06:15.

I’d organised breakfast for 08:15 so that gave me a couple of hours to catch up with stuff that needed doing, and then off to rejoin the Land of the Living.

The people here – other guests as well as the landlady and her father – were very pleasant and we passed quite an agreeable hour or so chatting.

And I learnt something thing morning. According to the old guy who had worked out in Labrador, it was the berserk behaviour of the compasses of the aeroplanes of the Atlantic Ferry flying over Labrador and Upper Quebec that first alerted people to the presence of the iron ore deposits.

Breakfast was really nice – they respected my diet – and the home fries and fruit was superb. along with toast with vegan margarine (the landlady had some in stock). She even let me check the label on the container.

Orange juice and coffee too, and as soon as you had taken a coupe of sips out of your mug the old guy would totter by and fill it up.

After breakfast I had a shower and started to organise my stuff. I need a blanket and pillow for the boat and not much else so I could go through my rucksack and eliminate what won’t be needed until I dock.

That was my cue to hit the road and having safely and correctly negotiated the roundabout, I eventually arrived in North Sydney.

But I didn’t go very far, because regular readers of this rubbish will recall that amongst our projects that we undertake on our travels is to find the local football ground.

It’s not exactly what I would call a stadium, and I don’t think that a pair of wingers would be of any great advantage on this pitch, given how narrow it is, but it’s a football pitch all the same and that’s a rare thing to see in North America.

Ahhhh – so THAT’S what happened to Superfast IX.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a company organised a ferry service from Rosyth in Scotland to Zeebrugge in Belgium.

It picked up two giant ships from the Baltic that had been part of a (failed) project launched by the Swedish government in the early years of the 21st Century to run a ferry across to Rostock.

The Rosyth-Zeebrugge ferry service didn’t last too long either and the ships were delared surprlus to requirements. I don’t know where one of them went to and I didn’t know about the second – Superfast IX – but I do now!

Here she is, in all her glory, back in service as Atlantic Vision and I’ll be travelling on her this afternoon to Argentia.

Fastest ferry on the North Sea she was in her day, and I hope that she lives up to her reputation across the Gulf of St Lawrence.

And while I was taking a photo of Atlantic Vision I was treated to something of a ballet just outside the port.

As the Blue Puttees was reversing out of her berth on her way with the lunchtime sailing to Channel Port aux Basques, Lief Ericson, the truckers’ ferry that runs between North Sydney and Channel Port aux Basques, was pulling in behind her.

I was lucky enough to be treated to a very rhythmical dance as the ferries manoeuvred around each other

As for Lief Ericson, what can I say about her?

We all know about her and probably many of us have travelled on her before in her previous existence as Stena Challenger.

Built in 1991, she was named for the lost Space Shuttle and spent the first 10 years of her life operating out of Dover to Calais and occasionally Dunkerque, with a little relief spell on the Holyhead-Ireland route.

As for Blue Puttees, she was one of the two ships that came here a couple of years ago to replace Caribou and Joseph and Clara Smallwood.

Built in 2006, she was formerly the Stena Trader and she and her sister (here as the Highlander) ran the short-lived ferry service from Hoek van Holland to Killingholme in the UK.

She takes her name from the nickname given to the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

Another thing that regular readers of this rubbish will recall is the regret that I have for the decline of educational standards throughout the western world.

It’s not particularly important (but it’s still sad nevertheless) if Joe Public can’t speak English correctly.

But when a body like the North Sydney Historical Society and the North Sydney Town Council don’t understand the basics of English grammar then it really is something that depresses me enormously.

Mind you, having said that, poor English grammar is one thing. The North Sydney Historical Society’s rewriting of history is something else completely.

I don’t know who it is that they employ as a proof-reader but I wouldn’t pay them in washers because this isn’t the kind of error that would normally sneak by un-noticed.

I just wonder what was going through the minds of the people who wrote the text, the proof-readers who checked it and the printers who printed it.

Having been for a good walk around the town I went back and sorted out Strider. But not before I’d been accosted by a particularly aggressive beggar who became most upset when I told him to clear off.

Thanks to the laundry basket that I bought yesterday, all of the food is now assembled in one place. Everything else is filed away tidily thanks to the cargo net that I bought last year.

It was thus quite easy to locate my blanket (the one that I bought at Dysarts two years ago), my towel and my little pillow and they are now nicely stored in my rucksack ready for the sailing this afternoon. I intend to be as comfortable as I can.

And so I went back to where I’d met the beggar (and photographed the ships) with Strider to make my lunchtime butties and sit in the sun admiring the ships.

If you look at the photograph above which shows the dancing ships, that’s actually the site of the coal staithes and the dock in which the coal ships going out to Newfoundland and the outlying islands would have been moored.

A branch of the railway line came down here bringing the coal from a local mine. But unfortunately there’s not a single trace of anything from that period still remaining.

The interesting thing about it all is that it’s actually an artificial “island” – formed by the rocks brought as ballast by the ships that came here empty for the coal.

At the dock entrance we had a nightmare. I had found the tickets but I needed to produce my passport and my driving licence. And I couldn’t find them anywhere, despite stripping out Strider.

The last time that I had had them was yesterday when I handed them over to the girl who took my booking. And so the girl in the booth telephoned just about everyone to see if I had left them and they had been handed in.

But no such luck. I’m hopeless when it comes to finding things as you know, and so I have to discipline myself to have a proper place for anything. And when they aren’t there I’m cooked.

But luckily I still have my powers of persuasion and I was eventually allowed to join the queue of vehicles heading for the ferry.

In the ferry office I hustled them there but it was to no avail, and so back outside I started to strip out Strider properly. My driving licence I can at a push live without, but my passport is something else and it must be found.

And then after about 30 minutes of sheer panic, the light suddenly went on. The little bag that I wear around my neck where I keep my bank cards and my North American money. Sure enough, in my haste, I’d stuffed them in there, hadn’t I?

So everything is now back in its proper place where it ought to be. I really ought to be much better organised than I am if I’m going to have a seamless, trouble-free trip around the world.

We were ushered onto the ferry comparatively early and we were lucky, being one of the first aboard.

I left His Nibs in charge of Strider and composing modern-day sea-shanties for the 21st Century.

I suppose that he has to keep himself entertained until we reach Newfoundland – he’ll have plenty to occupy his mind once he’s there.

The lift was occupied so I had to stagger up several flights of stairs – and steep they were too.

But I managed to grab a good spec on board – right at the bow of the ship with a stunning view out over the ferry terminal.

And next to one of the very few working power points on the ship too. Routine maintenance doesn’t seem to be the strongpoint of Marine Atlantic.

Much to my surprise, because I’m from Europe, we started up bang on the dot of 17:30

We reversed out and this gave an opportunity to have a good view over the town. Not that there’s a great deal of the town to see are there are vacant plots of land all over the place.

This isn’t just an indictment of the collapse of the town’s industry with the end of the mining and railway operations here, but also of the three devastating fires that have destroyed the town.

And we missed the oportunity to have our own ballet just offshore because we hadn’t gone more than 5 minutes out of harbour before we saw Highlanders coming down the inlet.

We know all about her because we’ve sailed on her before. She’s formerly the Stena Traveller and was likewise on the short-lived Hoek van Holland-Killingholme service.

It’s nice to see Marine Atlantic spending money on upgrading the fleet, and with the F A Gauthier in Matane replacing Camille Marcoux, that only leaves poor Apollo as a relic of a bygone age still struggling across the Gulf of St Lawrence.

But there’s plenty of shipping in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

With the telephoto lens on the new camera I can take pictures miles away but photographing through a double-glazed marine window with a telephoto lens from a moving platform such as a ship means that it’s always going to come out blurred.

But never mind. We’ll have better luck later.

As darkness fell we were treated to a folk singer.

Mike Averill, his name was, and he entertained us for quite a while with his acoustic guitar, his songs and his semi-biographical stories particularly about his father Garry.

And it’s a good job too because catering facilities on this ship are … errr … minimal. There’s an a la carte restaurant and some kind of fast-food place that does hot dogs and sandwiches, but that’s your lot.

There’s nothing here for me to eat, and so I have a feeling that this is going to be a very long voyage for me.

As soon as this folk-singer finishes, I’m going off to look for the reclining seats and bed myself down for the night. But not until he finishes because I’m enjoying his music.

Friday 18th August 2017 – SO HERE I AM …

… sitting on the coach station in Montreal waiting for my bus to Florenceville, totally exhausted. Luckily there’s a seat right by the gate that I need because I won’t be able to crawl much farther – I’ve had a hectic day!

I had another good sleep last night – which is hardly a surprise after all of the walking that I did yesterday, and then spent half an hour trying various key combinations of the laptop to see if I could fire up the keyboard, because you’ve no idea how inconvenient this external keyboard really is.

But all to no avail.

I nipped out to Tim Horton’s for breakfast and, much to my dismay, we were having a torrential rainstorm. What a way to finish my last day in Montreal.

Back here I started to pack and despite having emptied some stuff out of the suitcase, it seems to be even more full than it was before and it’s becoming something of a struggle to close it up. Either I shall have to dump some stuff or Strawberry Moose will have to go on a diet.

First stop was round at Josée’s. She works as a co-ordinator of some kind of project for reinsertion of people into the mainstream and part of their work includes running a series of craft workshops. It’s Zoe’s birthday tomorrow and I wanted to buy her a present, and I’d seen some stuff there that looked really nice.

So braving the rainstorm off I set, and I did have quite a lucky find. I stumbled across a second-hand computer shop where they had 50 laptops for sale, all of which seemed to be at bargain prices. Far from being the latest spec of course but if this one is about to give up the ghost I can organise a quick replacement.

Taking my leave of Josée I wandered up the hill to see what was going on. I noticed that a corner of the park had been closed off.

It seems that there’s an open-air music concert this weekend and they were all there setting up the stage.

Well, I wish them all the best of luck and I hope that the weather improves because it will be rather miserable if it doesn’t.

These people can give you much more idea of what the weather is doing right now.

I bet that you wondered what happened to all of the Routemasters that were phased out of London. The Londonders might not appreciate them but the rest of the world does and they are scattered all across the globe.

This is JJD274D with its top cut off being used as a sightseeing bus and the passengers are clearly enjoying it despite the rain.

You’ll notice that the rear platform has been “turned” for “driving on the left” operation

The weather slowly started to clear itself up so I headed back into town.

I’d heard about “Chinatown” and on my walk with Josée the other day I’d actually gone past it, so it seemed like a good idea to go into town that way.

But I do have to say that despite the banners and artificial arches it’s something of a disappointment. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I was expecting more than this

By now it was approaching lunchtime so I made my way into the big Complexe Desjardins.

There’s a huge food court in the basement and also this magnificent fountain that’s really well-worth admiring – a performing art in its own right.

I had a good prowl around the different food outlets but ended up as usual at the Subway for my 12-inch vegetarian without cheese, and mustard sauce.

And here’s a thing!

Do you know what the must surprising thing in the world is?

It’s to discover that you are sitting on one of these toilets that has an automatic flush that sets itself off into motion about 30 seconds after you’ve closed your eyes for a little doze.

You may remember from yesterday that there were some ships in port but I was unable to read their names.

The weather wasn’t right for sunbathing so I reckoned that I’d go for a walk along the docks to see what they were.

That was however not counting on some kind of invasion by some kind of colonial troops. Not British “redcoats” quite clearly, but there was obviously something going on somewhere.

But I wasn’t in the mood to go and check it out – despite the depressing weather there’s an ice-cream van selling vegan ice-cream down at the Old Port and I reckoned that I deserved a treat.

We’ve seen the clock tower – the war memorial to the Canadian merchant marine victims of World War I – on several occasions, but never from this angle.

I’ve taken a little detour round to the offices of the Montreal Yacht Club to make “certain enquiries”.

One idea that has gone through my mind on several occasions is the idea about hiring a cabin cruiser for a week or two to have a cruise down the St Lawrence, and the Yacht Club seemed like the best place to make enquiries.

But apparently that possibility doesn’t exist on the St Lawrence, which is very depressing.

There are however plenty of “organised” river cruises something similar to this one, but that idea doesn’t appeal to me too much.

And Josée told me about the cruise liner that sails from Montreal to the Iles de la Madeleine, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we saw that ship in dry dock downriver a couple of years ago and we had a good look over it.

We were at the Gare Viger yesterday and although the building is still there, it’s difficult to see where the railway lines ran, due to modern construction that seems to have wiped out part of the track bed.

But not far away is this road viaduct that doesn’t seem to be serving much or a purpose these days.

It made me wonder if the railway lines passed underneath here at one time as they curved round to join up with the lines that run through the port.

There were steps up to the roadway so I climbed up. This was the road out of the city to the east and so I followed it.

Underneath in the shadow of the Pont Jacques Cartier is this weird building that looks like some old steam pumping house.

The slogan carved on the walls is “Concordia Salus” which is the official slogan of the City of Montreal, so it was formerly a municipal building of some description.

This on the other hand is a building belonging to the Quebec Provincial Government as you can tell by the Quebec flag that’s flying from the roof.

If you are thinking to yourself that this has something of the air of being the local nick, you are quite right – it’s the “Prison des Patriotes” – the old “Pied au Courant” gaol where the perpetrators of the 1837-1838 rebellion were incarcerated.

It’s now a museum.

but let us turn our attention to the Pont Jacques Cartier for a brief moment, seeing as we are passing underneath it.

That bit that we see here isn’t even half of it. That’s the Ile Sainte Helene over there – not the south bank of the river, and there’s just as much, if not more bridge on the other side of the island leading over to Longueil

While I was wandering around the docks earlier I fell in with a couple of Port security guards, so I asked them about the Manitoba.

They hadn’t even noticed that it had been there moored up for over a year so they couldn’t tell me what was going on with it.

But they did say that it was attended and that there was the occasional maintenance crew aboard, so it wasn’t abandoned or laid up.

Nevertheless, according to my own research, she’s been in port now for 486 days – since April 17 2016/

The next ship in at the docks is the Damia Desgagnes.

She’s a gas tanker of about 15;000 tonnes and has arrived in port from a voyage around the Great Lakes via the Welland Canal.

You’ll remember that we stuck our noses into the Welland Canal on our trip in 2010

Way over there in the distance we have the huge Algoma Guardian.

Not as huge as all that though – a mere 23;000 tonnes and built in 1987.She’s come in from Quebec, having been on a voyage down through the Great Lakes.

And even as I speak she’s back on her way up the lakes again.

Final ship – at least – that I could see, is the Ferbec, a bulk carrier of just over 27;000 tonnes.

Owned by the Canadian Shipping Lines, as you can tell, she arrived in port almost 3 weeks ago on a marathon journey that started on Christmas Eve in Shanghai.

Yes, I’ve been having my money’s worth here in the Port of Montreal, haven’t I?

It’s a long walk back into the centre of town and so, dodging the hordes of beggars that seem to be on every street corner here in ?ontreal; I headed back down the rue Ste Catherine Est.

And no surprises for guessing what I have stumbled upon here. I’ve heard about the installation of speed cameras here in Quebec and this is what one of them looks like.

But judging by the state of the roads around here, I wouldn’t want to be doing any more than 50kph. I’ve seen parts of the Trans-Labrador Highway that are in better condition than this.

I don’t know where the City is spending all of its money, but it’s certainly not on the public highway.

For those of you with a musical bent, you’ll enjoy Montreal right now.

I talked earlier today about the open-air concert and we’ve mentioned the public pianos when we’ve been here in earlier years.

They are still here – at least, this one in the rue Ste Catherine est is – and the guy who was tinkling away at the ivories wasn’t all that bad at all.

Not only that, while I was having a coffee outside the Tim Horton’s; some giutarist came and set himself up to busk in the street.

“I’ll take a photo of him in a minute when I’ve finished my coffee” I mused to myself” but by that time he had packed up and cleared off. It had been a long day and I was pretty exhausted.

But my luck was in – if that’s the correct phrase – higher up the street.

I happened to catch a performance by the worst bagpiper in the world – and I’ve heard some bad pipers, I’ll tell you that.

Everyone has to learn and that everyone has to start somewhere, that’s for sure, and I’m all in favour of live music, but there ARE limits all the same.

I’d be embarrassed to be out on the streets playing like that for money.

While I’d been on my travels I’d been looking out for a likely place to eat, and I’d noticed another falafel place. That was my next stop as by now it was after 19:00.

But to say that I was disappointed was an understatement. The food was reasonable but the price ended up being utterly extortionate so I’ve crossed that place off my list for next time.

A stagger back to the hotel for my suitcase which I had left in the cupboard, and then off round the corner to the bus station.

The bus was in early so I could grab a comfy seat, which is always nice and useful. Internet and electricity too so that I could listen to some good music.

And the irony of having spent a good hour or so crawling underneath the Pont Jacques Cartier is that we actually drove over it on our way out of town.

Didn’t stop at Longueuil though – no-one wants to board there apparently, so next stop is the Sainte-Foy interchange on the outskirts of the city of Quebec.

Thursday 17th August 2017 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… the disasters were quite limited today and I had something of an interesting day.

One of the things that I’ve been doing each time that I come here is to go to the end of the line of a different metro line to see what goes on there, and I’ve exhausted them all. But I’ve been a regular traveller on Bus 202 when I was out in the sticks and never seen what’s at the end of that. And so that was today’s plan.

I’d had a reasonable sleep, which always seems to put me in a better humour. And I’d been on my travels too. I was teaching an “English as a foreign language” course and at the interval I had some goodies to share out. But for that I needed some spoons and the ones in my drawer were so dirty – so I went off to wash them. It took ages too and in the end the person who was supervising me suggested that I abandon the treat that I had lined up, went back to my classroom and re-started the lesson a little early so that we could finish early and go home.

Breakfast was at Tim Horton’s as usual and I made full use of their internet. I noticed on one of these mapping sites that it’s possible to download maps for off-line use, so I downloaded a map of Canada just to be on the safe side. I’ll download a few others too while I’m at it.

After spending a few hours back here doing some work I went out to hit the Metro. And here I had quite a major surprise too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will remember that the metro trains here were old, filthy things from when the lines were built 50 years ago and had received nothing in the way of upgrade ever since then.

Well, all of this has changed.

There are still plenty of the old trains knocking about on the system but there are also some shiny new ones and I was lucky that the one that I wanted was one of those.

They are clean, nicely illuminated with “traffic lights” on the doors and you can walk the whole length of the car.

With them being open like that you can see some interesting views as the trains snake their way around the system and it occurs to me that at some point I might do a video of it.

I found a nice length of track that would be suitable.

Regular readers of this rubbish will also recall that last year on my travels I saw a really nice church and took a photo – but forgot to note the name.

That was on my list of things to do and so I went off for a little perambulation; seeing as I was in the vicinity.

And my luck was in too, and doesn’t that make a change?

Some guy was loitering outside doing stuff and seeing me admire the building he came over for a chat

He told me that it’s the Eglise Ste Croix and its claim to fame, because it certainly has one, is that it was moved here stone-by-stone 80 years ago (1931 as I was to find out later) during some redevelopment work.

Today it’s a museum and as there was some kind of event going on there, I was allowed to enter it for a look around.

I couldn’t take my bag (or my camera unfortunately) in there with me but I managed to smuggle in the telephone, and the results aren’t too bad, I suppose.

Although I wish that the stained glass windows had come out better.

There were all kinds of exhibits in there, mostly relating to works by local craftsmen through the ages.

Lots of carpentry – 18th and 19th-Century furniture and the like but it wasn’t possible to photograph them.

Here in a quiet, discrete corner there was the possibility to photograph this group of religious statues which I found quite impressive.

And so back to the DuCollege metro station down the road and the Bus 202. And off we set down to the end of the line, with me making careful note of where all of the bus stops for the interesting places like IKEA were.

You can do that now because with the modernisation of the Montreal Public Transport system that seems to be taking place, they have a stop-announcement system as the bus is driving – “prochain arrêt Cotes de Liesse Cavendish” which is where you alight for IKEA.

There are roadworks going on all over the motorway network here in Montreal right now, and when we were here last year I showed you why.

This year, our bus stops at the traffic lights right by another fine example of Quebecois motorway engineering.

The whole system is like that.

Our bus stops at the Dorval railway station – which I’m determined to try out one of these days – and then turns off into “Dawson”, which is the street where it is supposed to finish. And I prepare to alight.

But instead, the driver changes the headboard sign and we continue on. I wasn’t expecting this.

We skirt the huge Lac St Louis which is absolutely beautiful and where I was expecting to go for a walk, but we still carried on driving. For hours, it seemed.

But all good things come to an end and we fetch up at a huge shopping centre on the edge of the city.

And I’ve been here before because there’s so much that I recognise. And the funny thing is that we aren’t all that far from the airport. but what a road we took to get here.

I go off to organise lunch and then for a good prowl around the Walmart and the Home Depot down the road. Couldn’t find a Canadian Tire but there must be one somewhere in the vicinity.

I have two choices of going back to the city – one is to retrace my steps on the 202 and the second is to find the express bus 485 that operates in the vicinity.

I eventually track that down and leap aboard. A few stops around the immediate area and then onto the motorway into town, with a stop at Dorval railway station and the persistent queues in the roadworks and rush-hour.

I’m dumped at the Lionel Groulx Metro Station and take the metro to the Place d’Armes.

It’s a different way to the Old Port from the one that I usually take and I’m glad that I came this way.

There’s not much left of the original dockside buildings of the mid-19th Century when the port was in its heyday but I manage to stumble on one of the very few surviving areas.

This is just how the place – or any Victorian city in the British Empire – would have looked 150 years ago abd I bet that it won’t be here much longer.

And bingo! I strike it luck down on the Vieux Port.

We passed the ice-cream van yesterday and I hadn’t paid much attention to it. But today, in the heat, I give it a close examination and there we are! Vegan ice-cream!

Of course I cannot let an opportunity like this pass me by, can I?

Several ships in the harbour too; including our old friend Manitoba who still seems to be there from last year

I couldn’t read the names of most of the ships but this one seems to be the Federal Spey.

Although she’s in the colours of the Canadian Shipping Lines she’s another one of these that’s registered in the Marshall Islands, something possibly not unconnected with the fact that Corporation Tax for maritime activities in the Marshall Islands is just 3%

And people are so upset about refugees receiving a couple of hundred dollars!

And we had a miracle in Montreal too.

As I was walking by St Pauls … errr … I mean – the docks; the sun suddenly appeared through the clouds right between the arms of Jesus outstretched on top of his church or whatever it is.

Nothing wrong with a bit of divine intervention every now and again.

I carried on to my usual spec at the clock tower to sit on the steps, watched a young girl of about 3 playing with her parents, and admired the Manitoba and the Pont Jacaues Cartier.

They say that a good many historical places in the New World are named for the Europeans who discovered them.

And I’ve often wondered what Jacques Cartier must have said when he arrived here on 2nd October 1535 and discovered this bridge.

My road back into town took me past the Marché Bonsecours.

This is one of the most spectacular buildings still remaining in the old city and we’ve visited it a few times.

In fact on one occasion last year I crashed out in the coffee bar when I had a funny turn when I was out a-walking.

Luckily I’m feeling a little better this year than I did back then.

This group of people caught my eye, all dressed in white.

And if you want to know what they are doing, you have to ask them. And so I did.

It’s one of these crowding things, apparently. They all assemble at a certain spot and these are off to eat a sandwich somewhere in the city -in the street.

They’ve even brought their chairs with them

It’s not possible for me to come here without going to see the most beautiful building in the whole of Montreal.

This is the Gare Viger – the old Canadian Pacific railway station that was abandoned when they CPR pulled out of the east of Canada and is a sad reminder of the collapse of the Canadian railway system.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it was in a very sorry state and threatened with demolition at one time – which would have been a tragedy.

It has however been undergoing a programme of renovation and as luck would have it, a workman had nipped outside leaving the door open.

It goes without saying that as he nipped outside, I nipped in behind him and took a few photos before I was thrown out.

I have to say that I don’t think all that much of the renovations, but at least it’s been saved for the future – something that 5 years ago was looking very unlikely.

Now I’m sure that I can’t be the only one who sees the total irony in these two signs next to each other at the Chapelle de Notre Dame de Lourdes/

One of them reads “this church was erected in the Glory of Mary thanks to the generosity of her Friends” and the second one reads “it is strictly forbidden to loiter or to seek alms whether inside or outside the Chapel”

It’s this kind of thing that gives the Catholic Church the kind of bad reputation that it has today.

On this point I went off to a Lebanese restaurant that I’d noticed the other day and they served an excellent assiette falafel with diced potatoes. And didn’t that go down a treat?

Now it’s off to bed for an early night. My last day in Montreal tomorrow and I need to be on form because I’m on the overnight bus tomorrow night.

No sleep for me!

Wednesday 16th August 2017 – WE HAVEN’T FINISHED …

… with our series of calamities yet.

First thing is that the keyboard on the laptop has now seized. I’m not sure how that has happened – it must have been when I closed the lid in a hurry and trapped a pen in between the keys, and this has somehow triggered off the key-lock combination.

Having tried all kinds of combinations that I (and several gallant friends) could remember, it’s still stuck firmly solid.

I discovered this this morning when I went to type of the results of my travels during the night. I was in charge of two young girls – aged about 9 and 5 – and I had to make a sandwich for them. The 9 year-old was straightforward enough but for the younger one it was the tiniest lump of baguette with next-to-nothing on it. It was clear that this wasn’t going to do her much good but I told her to eat it and if it wasn’t enough she could have a bit more. She was quite clear that she needed more than this. Nevertheless, I told her to eat it “and then we’ll see”.

I was awake at 02:30 this morning but no chance of me staying awake, even had I wanted to. I went back to bed and to sleep. 05:00 was much more like it.

I’d put the Canadian mobile phone on charge in something of a forlorn hope last night. USB data cables clearly don’t work so I’d tried the mains charger and it seemed to have done the business.

But here’s the next problem – in that there’s no credit on it apparently even though I had put $100 on it just before leaving. And so that’s never right. Just one more thing sent to try me, I suppose.

And yet another calamity surrounds the hotel. I’ve stayed here before but that was due to having to leave here at about 05:00 long before breakfast would be ready. This time though, there’s no issues about breakfast so I was quite looking forward to it – only to find that the place doesn’t serve breakfast.

The nearest Tim Horton’s is a fair walk away but nevertheless off I trotted for bagels, coffee and orange juice.

While I was there, and having a think – which I occasionally do – WhatsApp came to mind. using the Tim Horton’s wi-fi service, I downloaded it and configured it on my Europe phone.

My European service provider supplies a service for North America at €29 per fortnight and this doesn’t work out to be much more expensive while I’m here than my Canadian phone supplier would be, and the interesting thing is that I can use that in the USA.

All I need now is for Rhys to tell me the final two digits of the phone number that he’s using so that I can check that I have it and add it in.

Off I trotted down the street to reserve my bus for New Brunswick, and much to my surprise and delight, there are evening buses at the times and on the days that I want them. So I’m off on Friday evening at 21:30 to arrive Saturday morning at 09:00. But there’s a wait at Ste-Foy and … err … 2 hours wait at Riviere-du-Loup.

Next stop was the Dollar Store to organise a North American USB transformer for the phone. It takes about a week to fully-charge off the laptop. And it came up trumps with that and some other stuff too.

And outside, we had a strange sight. Loads of nursery-age kids wandering around the streets with guardians and the like. A couple of groups were in multi-pushchairs like the old “knife box” stage buses of the 1870s and I wasn’t quick enough with the camera, but I was for this arrangement that I thought extremely interesting.

At Bell Telephones I found the reason for my difficulties. The contract that I have has been abolished and, not only that, an upgrade to the system has rendered my phone obsolete.

And when I told the people that I wasn’t interested in buying a new phone, they lost interest in me completely. So that’s the end of Bell Telephones, then. I can’t say that I’m sorry.

It did occur to me afterwards that this was the same Bell shop that threw me out a few years ago. Perhaps it’s just an issue with this place and its manager, but I couldn’t care less now.

Not too far away is a computer shop, so I popped in. And popped out again with the cheapest USB keyboard in the place. If this doesn’t work then I’m stuffed (and it clearly does, because that’s how I’m managing to type this).

I’d arranged to see Josée so off I went to her place of work. The street where she works is a strange one – there’s a southern half and a northern half, with a bit missing in the middle.

And so, of course, Brain of Britain walked along a street that passed through the gap in the street so I had gone miles beyond it before I realised. And so I had to retrace my steps.

That had given me an opportunity to see a part of the rue Sherbrooke that I had never seen before. You might all recognise what that it up there, because we’ve stood on that point a few times before.

That’s the belvedere up on Mount Royal where there is that stunning view over the city that we’ve photographed on a few occasions. We’ve not seen it from this angle before though.

And what we have here is the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. We’ve not seen this building before either.

The First Nation totem pole – yes, I can go along with that, but the purpose of the pile of used vehicle tyres totally defeats me. It’s nothing that I would call Fine Art, but then regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I do have issues with this kind of thing.

Here’s a view that we all might recognise, because we’ve seen this before too. And had I known that Josée worked right here I would have been here in a flash without all of this messing about.

This is the park in the rue du Parc with Mount Royal park on the left and the Parc Jeanne Mance on the right; and Josée’s office backs onto the big skyscraper where I came in 2011 to talk to those guys about wind turbines and the like. It’s an uncomfortably small world these days.

And who was Jeanne Mance when she’s at home – if she ever is? She was the first lay (non-religious) nurse of the infant Montreal community and is the symbol of nursing here in the same way that Florence Nightingale is in the UK.

What with all of my prevarications, Josée had gone to lunch when I arrived and remembering that there was a “Subway” around the corner, I went and grabbed myself a butty too.

After lunch I finally met up with Josée. And being aware of my plight, she had brought in a spare mobile phone that she had lying around. Not only that, she knew a place where they would do a decent contract for a couple of months at a price far less than Bell could offer and with far more functions too.

That was well-worth a coffee so off we went for a drink and a chat and to catch up on everything that had happened since we had last seen each other.

With it being such a nice afternoon we set off to walk down to the river.

I was distracted on the way by this notice carved onto the wall of this building just here. Near this spot was where Marguerite Bourgeoys had her school for girls.

We remember her – she was the woman who came out with one of the very earliest groups of colonists to Montreal to look after the welfare of the women and children of the colony.

When we were at Troyes we went to see her birthplace, if you remember.

We didn’t actually make it as far as the river. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and the pedaloes on the little lake looked so inviting. And besides, I don’t have enough exercise as everyone keeps on telling me.

And so we took to the water and had a really good pedal around the lake for half an hour.

There’s quite a strong current in there too so heading upstream was quite a fight. And we ended up being quite out of breath by the time that we finished.

And do I remember this from last year? Or is it new?

Whatever it is, it’s a Big Wheel of course and part of the entertainment that’s provided along the old port of Montreal, although right now it’s not doing very much entertaining because there’s no-one about.

I don’t imagine that the view of the city is up to much though, because we are quite low down here and we are surrounded by tall buildings.

Seeing as by now Josée was exhausted and that I’d paid for the pedalo, she summoned up a taxi to take us to our final port of call – the jazz club in Montreal. There was a live act on and she had booked a table for us.

It has to be said that the live act was, well, not up to the standard that I might have expected given the nature of the venue. Even worse was that despite having ordered a vegan meal, they could offer me … errr … nothing.

I ended up with a salad and that was my lot. And with a bottle of water and the cover charge for the entertainment my bill came to $37!00. I shan’t be going there again, that’s for sure.

We put the world to rights on the way back and I ended up having an early night. My first day in Canada and it was a long one too. I was ready for a good sleep.

Tuesday 15th August 2017 – WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

“Start as you mean to go on” say I.

And so the usual performance at 04:00 this morning aroused me from my stinking pit. No idea what the neighbours are doing at that time of morning, but never mind.

And I saw from the fitbit (because I had another shower this morning) that I’d been awake a couple of other times during the night too. So all in all it wasn’t a good start to the day.

But it could have been worse. I could have been the two policemen in the Volkswagen van who thought it cool to jump the red light outside the building just as a motorist coming the other way decided to race the orange light. They will be sorting out that mess for quite a while, I imagine.

It’s only me though who could nip out across the road to the boulangerie for some bread for lunch and forget to take his money with him. Luckily there was some Moroccan bread at ?0:50, an amount which corresponded quite nicely with the small change that I had in my pocket.

But do you ever get the feeling that it’s not going to be one of your days?

We eventually managed to come to some agreement over the hotel room for when I come back. I arranged the room at the price that I’d paid for the room just now and I’m okay with that. Smallest room in the building but it’s not a problem, and neither is the price at just ?55 per night for a city centre hotel just a stone’s throw away from the station.

Having organised that, I headed off down to the Gare du Midi for my train.

The first TGV took me to Lille Europe. It was one of the older generations of TGV so we were rather cramped and it was not as comfortable as it might have been.

However, I was one of the first on so there was no problem about finding luggage space – something which can be an issue on these trains.

And my seat was right by the door too so I was one of the first off when we arrived.

We then had a wait at Lille Europe for my next train. And no-one was more surprised that I was to note that it was the double-decker to Marseille that had set out from … errr … Brussels 50 minutes later than the one that I had caught.

So what that was all about I really have no idea – why they couldn’t have stuck me on that one to travel direct, but I have noticed some … errr … anomalies with the SNCF booking site. Like the 7 minutes that it’s allowing me on the way back to negotiate the entire length and breadth of Paris Gare du Nord.

No electricity on this train, and we were all packed in, although with it being one of the new generations there was plenty of room to stretch out. And everyone was for some reason stressed out and irritable when we had to alight and the squabbles over unloading the baggage were something that I hadn’t seen for a while

Terminal 2 at Paris Charles de Gaulle is immense and it took a while for me to work out where I needed to be. But once I arrived, this was when the real problems arose.

Since 1st November 2016 passengers to Canada have needed a visa – such is the craven fashion that the Canadian authorities have surrendered to the Americans south of the border. Of course, with nothing having been said, Your Truly didn’t have one.

Neither did so many other people either, and there was a crew on duty to help passengers apply. Mind you, the female receptionist was far more interested in flirting with the male security guard than she was with dealing with stressed-out passengers, so you can imagine just how quickly this all descended into chaos.

Several bouts of sharp words – not all of them from me either – passed between the passengers and this girl and it took well over an hour for her to deal with what should have been a relatively simple matter. But in the end I was armed with an entry visa to Canada. And she won’t forget me in a hurry

We had the usual total nonsense at the “security” and I shan’t go into too many details because I’ve told you all about it so many times. There’s a couple of people there who aren’t going to forget me in a hurry either.

At the gate I had to … errr … negotiate in order to have an aisle seat. But the aeroplane had the last laugh in this respect because ONCE AGAIN the brassards had forgotten my special meal. There was a steward on the plane who tried to be funny with me about it, and he’s not going to forget me in a hurry too.

If I keep on giving people a piece of my mind like this, I’m not going to have much left by the time that I arrive in Montreal.

That is – if we ever arrive in Montreal because the plane was 50 minutes taking off, and very little of that was actually my fault.

Mind you, it would be wrong to say that I was … errr … unprepared for this. I’ve travelled with Air Canada before, haven’t I? The quinoa salad and Moroccan bread followed by the leftover fruit, with some of Alison’s crisps for a mid-air snack went down vert nicely.

To calm myself down I went to watch a film on the laptop (the in-fight entertainment is total rubbish) and found that the electricity supply seems to be set up for North American plugs only. And there I am with a North-American cable for my laptop power-pack, and it’s in the suitcase in the hold isn’t it?

Definitely not my day.

We were actually on time arriving at Montreal which was good news. The bad news was that there wasn’t a gate for us and so we had to sit for over half an hour until something was cleared. And that annoyed me intensely as you might imagine.

Much to my (and to everyone else’s) astonishment, there was hardly a queue at the Immigration desks and I’ve never had to wait for such a short space of time before being called up. And here the fun began again.

No trace of my visa, apparently. “But of course I have a visa” I wailed. How else zould I have been allowed to board the flight?”

So I had to connect my mobile phone, and that took much longer than it might otherwise have done too – not helped by the fact that I had switched it on to “flight” mode while I was on the aeroplane, and sure enough my Visa came up.

Or, at least, a Visa came up. But it wasn’t mine. That stupid girl at Charles de Gaulle had typed in my name incorrectly with the family name in place of the given name and vice versa. So that led to another round of arguments.

Eventually; after what can only be described as “considerable discussion” I was allowed through, but by now you can imagine the state in which I was. One exceedingly unhappy bunny here.

“Baggage at Carousel 6” was the notice, and so I queued at Carousel 6. And queued and queued.

After about half an hour of this I was pretty fed up as you can imagine. It’s a large suitcase (but not that large) so I wandered over to the oversize carousel to see if it might be there.

No luck there either so I wandered back to carousel 6. And queued and queued.

Something out of the corner of my eye made me turn round – and there on carousel 4 was my suitcase – and the suitcases of plenty of others who were likewise waiting. No idea how long it had been going around there but there it was – so I grabbed it and shot off out of the blasted place.

Getting my bus ticket was straightforward – and would have been even more straightforward had I not left my Canadian money in the suitcase instead of in the rucksack which was where I had originally placed it (I wondered this morning why I’d put it in there – now I remember!).

And only Brain of Britain can do this! When I stayed at this hotel before, it was in anticipation of an 05:00 start so I was long-gone before breakfast. And so it seems that I have managed to book myself into the only hotel in the whole of Montreal that doesn’t do breakfast.

And wandering around the city a little later in the evening, the nearest Tim Horton’s is quite some distance away. This isn’t so good, is it?

At least it was a beautiful evening and I enjoyed my stroll, even if it was quite late in real terms. I’m just around the corner from the “rue St Catherine Est” which is the “Gay Village” of Montreal so I was expecting it to be crowded with people.

But not so. No idea where everyone was, but in any case I decided to bugger off quite sharpish back to my hotel, finish off the quinoa salad and bread and have a good night’s sleep.

I need the sleep and to relax after all of my efforts. You’ve no idea just how stressful it all is doing all of this. I’m a bad traveller anyway and all of the problems that I’ve been having are enough to try the patience of a Saint.

And having given so many people a piece of my mind just recently, I don’t have very much left.

Monday 10th April 2017 – WHAT A SHAME!

I’ve actually seen a place that I liked today. It had everything that I wanted except for the kitchen of course (one of those really cheap units with the two ancient hobs and the fridge underneath so that the hobs take ages to heat up, they are pretty much uncontrollable, and they melt everything in the fridge).

And so why haven’t I signed for it then?

Two reasons really.

It’s not free until the beginning of July
It’s three floors up without a lift

And that’s that.

There was another apartment to let in the same building, on the first floor but without the terrace and the view of the sea. And that smelt as if the people living there had smoked 100 cigarettes a day for 20 years.

In other words, yet another wasted morning.

But on the other hand, it wasn’t exactly wasted because I did learn one or two things about the town.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, poor parking is a regular theme that crops up, and here, I regret to say, is yet another example of the dismal failure of other selfish motorists to respect disabled parking spaces.

This tells me more about the town than any other factor, and in this sense I’m glad that I’m not moving here.

But before I had left my little studio in Granville for my drive out, I had given the studio a quick clean-around and took some stuff down to Caliburn with me, and then we roared off to Barneville-Carteret to look at these apartments.

And then we roared back.

I finished off the tidying up and passed the inspection with the landlord, and then set off to find a place for tonight. And with what is befitting a holiday resort in the school holidays, there’s not a room to let anywhere in town.

After an hour or so of fruitless searching, we all took to the road and 80 kilometres and 80 minutes later we ended up in Cancale on the other side of the bay.

I had the last room here too – the Hotel le Chatellier – and at €60:00 it looks as if I have made a good choice. It’s quite comfortable and the shower is delicious. I spent half an hour in there.

No breakfast though. It doesn’t start until 08:00 and I’ll be long gone and down the road by then.

Cancale is beautiful. It’s nearly 30 years since I came here with Nerina and it’s changed dramatically in that it’s impossible to park by the sea.And it’s a hell of a climb up to the car parks at the top. And of course, all of the places to eat are at the bottom.

Luckily, on the edge of town was not darkness but a pizza van and we sorted something out. He came, would you believe, from Moisie in Quebec, so we had a really good chat.

Back at the hotel, I found a quiet little corner out of the wind and sat outside and ate my pizza. It really was a nice evening.

So now I’m ready for anything. Including two more ruins to visit tomorrow morning, and my train to Leuven at 11:50.

Wednesday 1st March 2017 – THE TROUBLE …

… with having had a really decent sleep during the day is that during the night it’s very difficult to drop off again. And so it was last night. Took me absolute ages.

But having said that, once I’d gone I’d gone, and until about 06:00 too. I had a quick look at the time, and turned over back sleep again until the alarm went off.

Breakfast here is at 07:30 but I still managed to haul myself out of bed early (no cacophony to accompany me, for which I am grateful) and stuck myself under the shower to liven myself up.

First down to breakfast (although I was almost immediately joined by others) and fruit salad, bread roll, orange juice and coffee. One thing about the breakfasts here, leaving aside the choice and the amounts on offer, is that everything is so fresh and tastes delicious.

And so it ought to be, given the price that one has to pay to stay in here. Of course, I’m not paying anything like the price indicated on the door, being stuck in my tiny little room in the garrett, but I’m not complaining for a moment.

What I was complaining about though was the internet. Sometime during the night it had crashed and they hadn’t been able to fix it. That left me hanging out on a limb for a while as I have so much to do here.

By 09:00 nothing had happened and so I decided to go for a walk along the promenade. It was grey and miserable, quite windy too, and there weren’t many people about.

We mentioned yesterday the story about the redevelopment of the promenade. Here, we have yet another old building from the Belle Epoch that has bitten the dust. It wasn’t as spectacular as the Villa Maritza, but there you go.

In fact by now, most of my old haunts from my spells in Oostende in the 1970s and early 80s have disappeared. All of the cheap hotels that used to be here have been swept away and replaced by blocks of holiday flats. One cheap hotel that I’d noted when I was here in 2013 had gone by the time that I came back here last November.

Not that it’s particularly relevant to this particular part of the discussion , but here’s a view of the corner of the promenade that I took this morning.

You can see another Belle Epoch villa here today, hemmed in by the more modern blocks of flats, and I wonder how long it will be before it’s gone too.

But there’s an exhibition of photos along the promenade showing us how Oostende looked 70 years ago just after the end of World War II and I noticed this photograph on display. It was taken from almost exactly the same spot as my photograph, and you can see how the corner looked back then, and compare the difference.

You might have noticed in the previous photograph the orange object on the promenade. There are actually about a dozen of them and they clearly have some kind of significance, although whatever it might be has so far escaped me completely.

It’s not exactly what I would call “artistic” but then what do I know? My idea of a sculpture is the column and statues to the right, a war memorial to the natives of the area who lost their lives at sea. It’s a shame that its site has to be cluttered up with these modern … errr … items.

I told you yesterday about the fish market here in Oostende. That’s it there, the white building with the blue wavy roof. I went for a look inside but there were only two stalls open and the choice of fish available wasn’t overwhelming. Not really worth photographing.

I reckon that the dock behind it was the old fish dock, but it’s used these days by the Police and the Customs authorities – people like that. It’s where their boats are anchored, or moored, or tied up.

When I was here in 2014 I stumbled across a ferry that I hadn’t noticed before, in all the years that I’ve been coming to the town. The deep-water port goes deep into the town and there isn’t a pedestrian way across the entrance. It’s a long walk around to the other side.

That’s the reason for the ferry, anyway.It’s only a small ferry, with room for 50 seats on board, and I took a photograph of it from the far side of the port entrance, with the town in the background. And also with the old ramps from the days when there was a ferry service across to the UK.

It’s always a bad idea for me to see a ferry, because I end up in a bad mood. In fact whenever I see a ferry it makes me cross. Especially when it’s a free ferry, and today is no exception. It always brings out the sailor in me.

Of course, that’s the reason why I was able to take a photograph from the other side of the port entrance – I’d piled on aboard the boat. As indeed you might expect.

You’ll notice by the way the booths on top of the quay to the right. It was some kind of market day going on up there.

It’s been months and months since we’ve had a real “Ship of the Day”, but you can’t go sailing across a port (even if it’s nothing like as busy as it was 50 years ago) without encountering a ship or two.

We’re in luck today, because here we have the Simon Stevin, registered in … errr … Luxembourg. Just imagine sailing this ship up the Moselle. She displaces 35,000 tonnes and was built in 2010.

She is actually a pipelaying vessel, and that will explain her presence here. With the expansion of the wind farm out on Thornton Bank, they will be needing extra cables laid to the shore.

The Simon Stevin would be the ideal vessel to be involved in a task like this.

The Simon Stevin isn’t the only big ship in the port either. We also have the Willem de Vlamingh in here too, and she’s likewise registered in Luxembourg.

She is your actual cable-layer and was built in 2011, displacing 6800 tonnes.

So here we are – some of the benefits that the wind farm has brought to the town of Oostende

As if that wasn’t enough, the harbour pilot boat was setting out of the docks and heading out to sea.

The entrance to the port is somewhat complicated and so a harbour pilot is necessary for certain boats that want to enter here. And so it looks as if there’s one of those standing offshore needing help to come in.

I couldn’t see anything hanging around outside, and nothing had come in by the time that I had left. I’ll have to go round later on this afternoon or maybe early tomorrow morning to see if anyone else has come in to join the party.

We saw in an earlier photograph – the one that I had taken of the Promenade in the 1940s – all of the fortifications that covered the shoreline of this part of the world. All of them built by the Germans in World War II

There are still plenty of them left, dotted all over the coast and we have seen plenty of them in the past. The eastern side of the entrance canal to the deepwater port is still littered with them even today and in all of the time that I’d been coming to Oostende I’d never actually been for a wander around them – until today, that it.

The port of Oostende had been a German submarine base in World War I and had been the subject of what was the precursor of the later commando raids of World War II. Not only that, the beaches here would make an ideal landing for the Allied armies coming to liberate Europe in 1944, what with the major port of Antwerp only just down the road.

Hence the German were quite nervous about the coastline around here and had used labour from the prison camps to construct these massive fortifications, as well as many others of all different types which have long-since disappeared.

What many people don’t realise though, because it was another one of these wartime secrets that wasn’t put into the Public Domain until the great release of wartime records in 1994, was that the Allies knew absolutely everything that there was to know about the Atlantic Wall, and they didn’t even need to send someone to look at it.

The company that had contracted to build it was a Belgian company, from the rue des Atrebates in Brussels. But what the Germans didn’t realise what that the company was actually owned by a Russian emigré called Leopold Trepper. And he had a part-time employment as a spy for the Soviet Union, leading a group called the Rote Kapelle or Red Orchestra

It was one of the greatest triumphs of espionage in World War II but because it was a Soviet triumph, it never received the acclaim that it deserved.

But the work was done thoroughly, and the vestiges are very difficult to remove. We’ve seen when we were in France a few years ago that one of the gun emplacements near the Atlantic Wall suffered a direct hit from a blockbuster bomb, and all that it did was to tilt the concrete.

That’s why many of these places are still here. Explosives are really the only way to remove them and it’s far too dangerous to destroy them in a congested area.

The Atlantic Wall isn’t the only set of fortifications here at Oostende. We have another exciting pile of stuff buried in the sand dunes.

Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to go over to it. It was all fenced off and I couldn’t find an obvious point of entry, and so I can’t tell you exactly what it is.

I shall have to make further inquiries.

We saw the new harbour wall when we were here in November. We walked the whole length of the other side of it in order to have a good look at what they had built, and I was tempted to go for a walk down this side of the harbour wall today, but the weather was conspiring against me.

There were some people out there trying to walk down there, but they weren’t having a great deal of success.

And you might be wandering what that bow of a ship is doing set up on a plinth out there

A closer inspection reveals that it certainly is part of the bow of a ship, and the colour gives you a clue – that it might be something to do with the Royal Navy.

It is in fact part of the bow of HMS Vindictive, a cruiser that has a very important claim to fame in the history of Oostende.

The British were concerned about the U-boats operating out of the port after its capture by the Germans during World War I, and so they launched two raids on the harbour, sinking ships in the entrance canal to the docks.

HMS Vindictive was one of those that was sunk here, in the raid on 10 May 1918, and when it was cut up for scrap, the bow section was preserved as a monument.

The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and we have thousands of photographs going back to 1970 of ships sailing up and down here.

As ships have grown larger and larger, there are fewer and fewer of them, but the size means that you can see them easier even when they are away on the horizon, especially if you have a 305mm zoom lens.

I’ve no idea what kind of ship that this might be, but it’s certainly a big one and it seems to have an on-deck cargo. There’s plenty of accommodation on there too, so I’ve no idea what it might be. I know that there’s a car transporter that takes passengers with it and sails from Hamburg to South America, but that is probably not it.

No prizes for guessing what this ship might be. The initials of the owner – MSC- painted on the sides gives the clue away, because we have seen dozens of these in the past sailing up the St Lawrence River on the way to Quebec and Montreal.

It’s a container ship of course, and a huge one at that. And it’s empty too. And that’s a symptom of the world’s reliance on China for its manufacturing industry and that the world has nothing to send back in return.

We saw all of this with Japan in the 1970s and how it led to the collapse of manufacturing industry in the UK. Now, the rest of the world is suffering, and this is the Brave New World into which the Brexiters have plunged their country, with no colonies and noallies to back them up.

With the telephoto lens still on the camera, I could take a photograph all the way down the beach in the direction of Zeebrugge. But you can’t see much down there because of the wind whipping up the sand all the way down the beach.

We were brave, those of us out there, but at least I had done what I had intended to do, which was to have a good visit of this part of Oostende. It’s hard to think that I’ve never been out here, in all the years that I have been visiting the town.

Now I can head back to civilisation.

Parked up at a wharf near the ferry is a sailing ship, the Nele.

You might think that she is an ancient ship but she was built as recently as … errr …2005, but to a design of a traditional Oostende masted sailing ship.

It’s possible to go off for a mini-cruise on board and I did admit that I found the idea somewhat tempting. But I imagine without any doubt that I’ll be back here some time or other, and so I can make further enquiries.

I’ve not quite finished yet over here.

We’ve seen the wind farm out there on Thornton Bank. That’s about 30 kms offshore and in order to bring the power onshore they have a huge submarine cable.

Outside their offices they had a couple of metres of cable on display, and so I went over to take a photograph of it. It’s interesting because NALCOR in Labrador have laid a cable under the Strait of Belle Isle and are planning another one under the Gulf of St Lawrence to Cape Breton, so I was curious to see what a submarine cable looks like.

It will be of interest to the Brits too. Having sold their electricity-generating capacity to the French, one of these will be laid across the Channel sooner or later to run British electricity across to France in the same way that the Compagnie Lyonnais des Eaux runs British water from Kent across to Northern France through the pipeline in the Channel Tunnel in times of drought.

Back on the other side of the canal I went to the Delhaize to buy some stuff for lunch. They had grapes on offer too so that was today’s fruit issue resolved, wasn’t it? And back here, I crashed out for an hour as soon as I got in, which meant that I was rather late for my butty.

This afternoon I had a few things to do, and then went out for a walk. And here I encountered yet more of Belgium’s world-famous customer service. I went into a café for a coffee, and sat and waited for a waiter.

And waited.

Eventually, a waiter appeared, and cleared a few empty tables – and then disappeared. Eventually, he came back and I ordered a black coffee.

And waited

And waited.

Eventually I picked up my coat and left, heading for the café next door. I’d beens een by the waiter, placed my order and had it put on the table in front of me long before the other waiter in the other café had brought me the one that I had ordered.

I came back to the hotel for a warm, and then wandered off for tea. I know a nice Italian restaurant here that is cheap but good value, and they served me up a delicious penne all’arrabbiata, nice, hot and spicy.

So I’m going to try for an early night, and see how I am, and how the weather is, tomorrow. I hope that it’s a nice day and that I’m feeling up to some exciting moments.

Thursday 23rd February 2017 – WHAT DO YOU NOTICE …

… that is not quite right about this photo? It’s the kind o thing that can only ever happen in Belgium

Closer inspection of the photograph should tell you what is wrong – there are a set of stairs and an escalator inside this Sports shop in Leuven. And the escalator is going downhill to the lower level, and to climb back up again you need to take the stairs.

That’s not the kind of thing you can make up, is it?

Only in Belgium!

I had a fair-ish night last night. Late dropping off to sleep although I did manage to sleep right trhough – until about 06:30 when someone else’s alarm awoke me. No idea whose, but anyway there I was.

I’d been on my travels too, reliving a “Gunsmoke” episode where some people were leaving the area and there was some dispute as to whether they would be taking their 4-year old girl with them. And I ended up babysitting for my sins. I don’t half have some rough jobs.

Alone again at breakfast and then back up here for a little repose, and I’ve done a little alteration here and there on my internet homepage. I created a web page with all of the links to the sites that I visit regularly, and I use that as my homepage. It’s getting a little out of control so I’ve been amending it to read better – it’s now three columns instead of two.

Later on in the morning, I had a shower and shave, and then went out for a walk.

I ended up not at the church around here, but at St Peter’s Cathedral in the city centre. I wasn’t aiming to go there, but walking past, I noticed that the doors were open, so I nipped inside.

The pulpit is magnificent as you can see in the photo. It’s really quite a work of art, bordering on the grotesque, and wouldn’t be out of place in a grotto somewhere.

The rear of it, which you can’t see, is actually a grotto and it’s a representation of the Calvary, the cross of the crucifixion with, underneath, the cave where Jesus was entombed until the resurrection.

And it did remind me of Cap de la Madeleine, the place in Quebec that we visited in 2011 where they had a competition of artists and sculptors to design an appropriate monument for the Calvary. And an Irish sculptor sent in a drawing of John Wayne on his horse.

From here I went for a wander around the shops (see the photo at the top of the page) and ended up back at Sports Direct. They still had some of those good-quality sports trousers on offer at €23 for two, so I bought another couple, seeing as the ones that I bought the other week are quite good.

That means that I have enough decent trousers for now, and I can relegate some of the other ones down the chain. I’ve decided too that I’ll order some new polo shirts from my supplier in the UK – have a wardrobe upgrade.

After lunch, I cracked on with my medical expenses and I’ve finally finished them. It wasn’t half an effort but once I got into the rhythm it was fairly straightforward. At least it means that I don’t have to pay postage and recorded delivery letter fees, and sending them by the internet is bound to be quicker than the Post anyway.

Later on I had a crash-out, and then went for tea. I’d called at the Delhaize while I was out for some potatoes, and so I had sausage beans and mashed potatoes followed by vegan ice cream sorbet and peach halves.

It’s a day off work tomorrow for me (yippee!) so with an early night, I might even be on form. But I’ll be continuing my process of having a little walk every day. I’ll see if that does me any good.

Tuesday 10th January 2017 – I TIDIED UP …

… this morning. In fact I spent a good 45 minutes making sure that my room was in really good, tidy condition (just for once).

Yesterday afternoon I’d had a knock on the door from the landlord’s sidekick. Would it be okay if they came by at midday and cleaned my room and changed everything around?

Of course it would, and so I spent all of that time making sure that everything was tidy and in its place, and then just before midday I headed into town.

I took my time, bought a pile of stuff in the Delhaize and then slowly wandered back here – to find that they hadn’t been. And here I am at 21:30 and they still haven’t been.

Last night I had my early night and was well-away. But at 01:30 I awoke to a loud noise on the laptop radio. And so I turned it off again and went back to sleep. And that was how I stayed until the alarm went off.

During the night I’d been travelling too – onto a stage where I was playing bass and singing in a rock group. But for some reason I couldn’t co-ordinate the singing with the bass playing and it was all coming out wrong. In fact it was quite a nightmare.

At breakfast I was joined by my Polish housemate (but not, unfortunately my Ukrainian djervushka which was a big disappointment. And immediately after breakfast, the Pole disappeared off with his suitcase. There’s a new arrival in his room but I don’t know who it is.

So apart from shopping and tidying up, I’ve been researching again today. I’ve found some exciting stuff too – the report of a Finnish archaeological expedition to Labrador in 1937 that came to an abrupt halt as the Finns were swept up in the Winter War against the Soviets. What’s exciting about this is that they report a story that they had heard in Newfoundland about a child in Labrador who was killed by a dog-team. This was denied by the inhabitants of the town, so they report, but yet I’ve seen a death certificate of a child in the town where the death has been described as ‘killed by dogs”.

And she’s not the only child so killed either. Look at the entry for 5th July 1941 as an example.

Not only that, there was some talk of the ancient lost (if not mythical) city of Brest being at Brador Bay rather than at Old Fort, following a discovery in 1968 of Basque artefacts there. But I also found the report of an archaeological dig at the site in 2014 where they concluded that it was actually an Inuit site with Basque artefacts having been recovered from elsewhere and reused
by the Inuit.

I was alone for tea, where I finished my kidney bean whatsit (and it was as good as I expected too) and now I’ll try for yet another early night. It’s quiet in here so I may as well take advantage of it. After all, it’s doing me good.

Friday 6th January 2017 – I HAD ENOUGH …

… pasta left over and so tonight I made myself a big tomato dish for tea, with enough left over for the next two nights too.

Onions and garlic fried together, and then added a tin of kidney beans, a tin of Macedoine vegetables, a big handful of peanuts, assorted spices and herbs and then a big dollop of tomato sauce.

And do you know what?

It was absolutely delicious. And it should be even better over the next couple of days if it follows the usual plan.

You might remember that I was planning on an early night last night. But I couldn’t drop off to sleep early and ended up doing some work on the laptop. When I noticed the time, it was 00:45 and that was the end of my early night.

I slept right through too, and awoke about 5 minutes before the alarm went off. And if I had been anywhere during the night, I don’t remember. It was like that.

Later in the morning I went out for my baguette, just down to the supermarket on the corner, and came back with a couple more plastic crates too. I have quite a collection now – so all that I need is a Plan to inspire me to pack them with stuff. But that’s not going to happen until the Spring now at least and maybe not then either.

Apart from that, I’ve spent most of the day reading up on stuff. More stuff on North-West River. It’s the worst thesis that I’ve ever read, it has to be said, but much of the gossip that’s in it, that you don’t usually find in a thesis, has helped me answer a few questions that I’ve had running around in my mind, and also solved a problem that I’ve tried to resolve in the past about the “old road” between Goose Bay and Churchill Falls.

I’ve had a crash-out too, as you might expect, and then it was tea time. And now it’s bed-time. An early night I hope, and a good sleep I hope even more.

But before I go, I’ve found a beautiful epitaph about Labrador. It was written by Judge William Malone as he took his leave from Dillon Wallace after they had been into the Labrador wilderness in 1913 to find the final camp of Leonidas Hubbard on his disastrous expedition of 1903.

“I’m leaving the country though with a feeling of profound regret. I wish I were just going in with you instead of going home. I never had that feeling before on leaving the wilderness, but this country has exerted a peculiar fascination upon me. I understand what it was now that drew you and Hubbard on and would not let you turn back. I have learned what you meant when you called it “the lure of the Labrador wild.”

And that’s certainly how I feel each time I cross the border into Quebec. And the more that I read about Labrador, the more I realise just how much I miss it and how I want to go back there.

I’m getting all nostalgic, aren’t I?

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: quebec

Thursday 21st September 2017 – REGULAR READERS …

Tuesday 19th September 2017 – HAVING BEEN …

Monday 18th September 2017 – WELL THAT WAS …

Sunday 17th September 2017 – THAT WASN’T …

Friday 1st September 2017 – STRANGELY ENOUGH …

Friday 18th August 2017 – SO HERE I AM …

Thursday 17th August 2017 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

Wednesday 16th August 2017 – WE HAVEN’T FINISHED …

Tuesday 15th August 2017 – WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

Monday 10th April 2017 – WHAT A SHAME!

Wednesday 1st March 2017 – THE TROUBLE …

Thursday 23rd February 2017 – WHAT DO YOU NOTICE …

Tuesday 10th January 2017 – I TIDIED UP …

Friday 6th January 2017 – I HAD ENOUGH …

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