Tag Archives: quebec

Saturday 1st OCTOBER 2016 – I HAD NOTHING …

… like as good a night as I have had on the others that I stayed here. For some reason I couldn’t put the blankets straight on the bed and it was all very uncomfortable. That rather disappointed me. And I was wide-awake by 05:40 too – something that hasn’t happened for a good few days.

But at least I got to see the sunrise for once, and it really was beautiful. Not quite the same as it had been in Greece three years ago, but beautiful nevertheless.That cheered me up for the morning.

I’d been on my travels too. There was some kind of meeting going on – a reward, effectively, for people who had worked for quite a while at a certain company – and this involved staying at a hotel. I’d arrived and been given my key so off I went to find my room – and that took ages to find. Eventually I discovered the room and went in – to find that the bed was all heaped up any old how. And there was a suitcase in there, belonging to someone else. I went back to reception to complain, and it turned out that we were having to share rooms. I wasn’t at all impressed with this and made quite a fuss about it. Eventually the organiser, a young girl, came over to chat with me and I told her precisely what I thought. She added that the place was dirty and totally unfit for what she had planned, and so was intending not to pay them a penny for what we had – or hadn’t – received. Although that didn’t solve my problem.
From here I went as an observer to see something going on in an industrial city. Transport was the big problem here, with a huge Ship Canal that passed by somewhere in the distance and all goods had to be trans-shipped onto railway trains. Some young guy had the idea of building a feeder canal to the city so that barges could sail up the ship canal straight into the city without any unloading at all. So he engaged a firm of contractors who built it, but not how I would have finished it off because he brought it to finish a row or so behind the main street, with buildings in the way. I would have knocked down the buildings and brought the canal basin up to the main street. But then he was given the bill. he was expecting a bill of a couple of million. The bill was in fact 50 million and he started to have a major panic about how was he ever going to pay it off and as yet no freight had actually sailed up his canal.

I was alone again at breakfast but ended up having a really good chat with mine host. But soon enough I was back in my room resting. I’m dismayed at just how easy I’m becoming tired these days, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. At least I’m here.

When lunchtime approached I hit the road, and headed off westwards to Franquelin. That’s a village on the coast halfway towards Baie Comeau. It’s situated at the base of a steep valley and it was where I had my run-in with the farces of law and order the other day.

This isn’t the modern road into the village by the way. The steep drop to the concrete bridge over the river looks fairly modern to me, and the village is canted off to the side alongside the river. This could well therefore be a previous incarnation of Highway 138 from a bygone time.

Looking back in the direction from which the road comes, you can see the road snaking along the side of the river. There is a bridge across the river way in the distance and I was musing to myself that this was the way that the road crossed the river back in the olden days. I was tempted to go for a look but there was a huge hole in the middle of the road where the local council was doing some work.

And another thing that you will notice is that autumn has arrived. The leaves on the trees are turning. It’s the best time of the year to come to Canada, as I have said before.

My landlord and I had discussed old vehicles, and he had told me that here in Franquelin there were a couple of old first-generation snowmobiles. I was half-hoping to see an early Bombarider such as the one that we saw at Goose Bay back in 2010.

I was rather disappointed not to see one of those, but I wasn’t disappointed to see this machine. I’m not sure of the make or model of this machine and it doesn’t appear to be as antique as I was hoping to find, but it’s certainly unusual and quite rare enough these days. I’d have gone over to have a look at it but the gates were all locked up and there were people around.

No such problems with this machine. This was parked up at the side of the town’s workshop in full view.

Anyone of my age will have seen one of these before. In Europe this would be a piste-basher, used on the ski slopes for flattening down the snow and also for transporting goods and supplies about.

It is a Skidozer 302, made apparently by the Bombardier company, and probably dates from the 1970s, not that I would know very much about it, and I would gladly learn more if anyone would care to communicate with me.

Back on the modern main highway and there’s a small pull-in at the side of the road just here, with a couple of tables. This is where I stopped for lunch, with the lovely view along the coast back in the direction that had travelled.

I had company for part of the time – a woman walking her dog came over for a chat, and someone in a nearby house was playing music so loud that it probably vould have been heard in Montreal.

And the bread that I had bought yesterday in Baié-Trinité was totally disgusting.I shan’t be shopping there again.

I drove on towards Baie Comeau and nipped down to Alcoa’s wharf to see if there was anything moored there.

I was in luck, because we did have a ship here. The Federal Nakagawa it is, a bulk carrier of 20,000 tons on her way from Jamaica to Toledo in the USA, on the Great Lakes via half a dozen or so ports along the St Lawrence.

I thought that she might have been the CSL ship that I had encountered on the St Lawrence while I was on the ferry from Matane the other day, but she didn’t arrive here until the 29th, and so she’s ruled out.

usually, in the bay there are half a dozen ships queueing up to unload, but there were none today. But in the main port is the Africaborg, a ship of the Wagenborg Line. She’s not as big as she looks, being of only 12,000 tons and built in 2007. She’s come here from Ulsan in Korea, from where she set sail on 27th August.

Long-term readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here in 2010 there was also a Wagenborg ship here in the docks but I can’t now remember the name of that ship

Apart from seeing the Africaborg in the docks, I had an interesting walk around the harbour here at Baie Comeau. Winter is approaching and there was something of a rush to remove boats from the water.

I had a very good time watching them try to load up a diesel-powered yacht onto a yacht trailer, and that was very interesting to see. It might be a surprise to you but I’ve never seen this done before so I was quite keen to watch them do it. But while I was watching them, I had an interruption.

My friend Rhys from South Carolina was on the phone. It’s the first time this year that I’ve heard his dulcet tones so I was quite keen to speak to him.

And while Rhys and I were busy chatting about his bus (he’s converting a redundant school bus into a mobile home) and the solar energy system that he’s installing in it, I was busy watching them remove the yacht. It was quite an art to drive (because it was using diesel propulsion) in between the stakes of the trailer and winch itself tightly onto the cradle so that they could pull the boat out of the water with the lorry and park it up for the winter.

And as our conversation rambled on, they pulled the yacht clear of the water and a couple of guys there gave it a thorough inspection.

And then they reversed the trailer back down into the water, slackened off the tethering ropes, re-positioned the yacht so that, presumably, it fitted better on the cradle, re-tightened the tethering ropes and pulled it out of the water again.

This time it passed its inspection and they towed it off around to the hardstanding at the side where, presumably, it will over-winter.

By now, the battery was flat in my telephone and I’d lost contact with Rhys, so I went off on the prowl to the other side of the docks, with a certain aim in my mind.

Baie Comeau is famous for having a small isolated railway network which presumably transports wood and pulp about. It’s not as isolated as people might think though, because there’s a rail ferry over to Matane where it connects with the Canadian National railway network (or such of it that remains after the decimation of the country’s rail network in the 1980s).

There are some railway sidings on the dockside and a couple of old diesel locomotives that move the railway wagons around. This is one of them. It’s SOPOR 4998, a General Motors GP38, one of the very last built and dating from November 1971.

And SOPOR? It’s the Societe Du Port Ferroviaire De Baie-Comeau.

I’ve actually been looking in the past for the dock from where the rail ferries leave, and I managed to track it down today, narrowly avoiding being squidged by a line of cars coming off the car ferry that had arrived a few minutes ago.

I couldn’t go over for a closer inspection because it’s all fenced off. But that’s it just over there, neatly hidden behind the installations for the car ferry. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a ship here, but you can’t have everything

In fact, the port of Baie Comeau is nothing like as busy as it used to be before Highway 138 along the north shore was completed in the 1960s. In those days it was the base for all kinds of goelettes, the boats that used to sail from village to village along the coast transporting supplies, ferrying people about, and returning with the output of the crafts carried on in the various villages.

Nowadays, there’s not even one coastal boat that calls here.

I mentioned wood and pulp just now, didn’t I? Baie Comeau owes its existence, like most of the towns on the North Shore, to forest products and the town was created almost from nothing in the 1930s when they began to exploit the timber in the interior of the region to make newsprint.

It was someone called Colonel Robert McCormick, who was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper in the USA who created the Quebec North Shore Paper Company to exploit the timber resources of the area for wood-pulp for his journals, and this is the modern pulp mill.

I went off to the shops, which are situated a couple of miles outside the town for a reason that seems totally bizarre to me. I arrived just in time to be thrown out of Walmart which, for reasons known only to itself, closes early on Saturdays. The other supermarkets have more realistic opening hours so the Maxi at the other end of the mall was where I did my shopping.

And why is shopping in North America so boring?

Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Heading back to town again, I went to play “hunt the railway line”.

I had visions of it disappearing way into the wilderness where trains would come back laden with lumber, but it seems to peter out here in the middle of the big industrial estate and I’ve no idea why. I went off to see if I could see anything else that might be railway-related, but there was nothing at all. I shall have to make certain enquiries at a later date in this respect. it wasn’t ‘arf disappointing.

But anyway, by now it was going dark and it was teatime. Seeing as how Godbout is so isolated and I’m never likely to be able to find my Sunday night pizza anywhere in the vicinity, I decided that I would have a Saturday night pizza from the restaurant at the traffic lights.

I ate it in the darkness on the way out of town. It was totally overpriced and totally disgusting but beggars can’t be choosers at moments like this. It was after all the only place in town.

Once I’d organised that, I headed off back to my little room in Godbout.

And here’s something else over which we can ponder.

These are the roadworks on the bridge over the river at Godbout and I know that I’ve mentioned them before. But on the way back tonight (I was coming in the opposite direction) we had some really weird goings-on. The lights on my side were on red so I waited, and a red pickup came through from the other direction, turned round and went back down again, even though the lights were against him.

And then we had a lorry coming the other way that had clearly burnt the red light because it was touch-and-go as to whether I would block him in as my light changed to green. He made it through with about a foot and half a second to spare otherwise he would have had to reverse all the way back downhill again.

And serve him right too.

Friday 30th September 2016 – THEY CALL ME TRINITY

Well, Baie Trinité actually, but never mind – it’s near enough.

We’ve been here before – in 2012on our mega-ramble down Highway 138 to be precise, but I’d only driven through the place without having the time to have a real poke around, and so seeing as it’s quite close to where I’m staying (a mere 37 kilometres – which is “right next door” over here on the North Shore of the St Lawrence River) I reckoned that I would come for a nosy around.

On the way out there, though, I encountered quite a beautiful lake. It’s at round about kilometre 831 and it’s called le Lac au Rat Musqué – Muskrat Lake – and I’d love to know how it is that some of these lakes and other natural landmarks earned their European names.

I didn’t take a photo of it in 2012 and I don’t know why. But there are lakes just about everywhere and I suppose that I was spoiled for choice.

First thing that you notice as you arrive in Baie Trinité is a rest area, right in the centre of what passes for the village and right by the shore. There are all of the usual facilities here, but it goes without saying that they are all closed up for the winter.

But anyway, it’s gone lunchtime, my stomach thinks that my throat has been cut and I have my butties to eat. I’ve run out of hummus but I do have some vegan cheese that I picked up in the Atlantic Superstore in Woodstock.

Baie Trinité’s claim to fame is that it is the home of the Centre National des Naufrages du Saint Laurent – the National Centre for Shipwrecks on the Saint Lawrence. This is a place that I would love to visit, but as you probably realise, it’s closed now until next season.

But one thing about it is that here you can “experience several major tragedies that have marked the history of Nouvelle France” but if anyone thinks that I’m going to experience a shipwreck at first hand just to satisfy my curiosity they are mistaken.

There have been plenty of shipwrecks along the coast as you probably know, and we’ve visited the sites of a few of them. And without any explanatory panel (which wouldn’t do you lot much good anyway because here in Quebec the Tourist Information is written in French only, just to spite the Anglophone tourists), I would say that this cannon is from a real shipwreck.

In 1690 a mariner by the name of Admiral Phips sailed up the St Lawrence in an attempt to capture Quebec from the French. He was unsuccessful, not the least of the reasons being that he lost several ships on the way up. And on Christmas Eve 1994 the remains of one of them – the Elizabeth and Mary – were found just off the headland at Baie Trinité.

And as you might also expect, just like every other village in Quebec, we have a church here, built in 1939.

I forgot to go over and see to whom it was dedicated (I’m really forgetting myself these days) but as this place is called Baie Trinité, apparently because Jacques Cartier is supposed to have visited the bay on Trinity Sunday in 1536, it’s quite possible that this could be the Church of the Holy Trinity – l’église Sainte-Trinité.

As we have said before, the beaches around here are magnificent, with all of the sand that has been deposited by glaciers as they receded at the end of the various ice ages.

I’m not a big fan of the beach here at Baie Trinité though. It’s right by the main highway and while it’s hardly the M25, you’d be surprised at the number of heavy lorries that go past here. It’s too noisy for me.

Instead, I’m going to head up the beach westwards. That’s far more sheltered behind the Tourist Information Centre and the church and where I’m less likely to be disturbed.

Except, it has to be said, by someone on a quad who decides to come for a ride out here as I’m walking along. Still, I do my best to avoid him and think pleasant thoughts instead as I take advantage of the beautiful sunshine.

All of the beaches, shores and river mouths along here are littered with rocks as you have probably noticed, and they too have been brought down here by glaciers (and latterly by rivers) from their places of origin.

Geologists can and do have hours of endless fun tracing rocks back to their original source and thus plotting the paths of glaciers and rivers during prehistory. It’s a fascinating hobby, so I’m told.

But this lump of rock on the beach is quite interesting. It caught my attention because it was glistening in the sunlight so I went over to photograph it. Unfortunately, the glistening hasn’t come out at all.

The rock is totally different from most of the others along here and to me (not that I would know very much about it) it closely resembles a lump of iron ore similar to what we saw when we tracked down the old iron mine at Gagnon last year.

There are many deposits of iron ore in the interior – Gagnon, Fire Lake, Mont Wright, Labrador and Wabush to name just five out of dozens, and it’s interesting to think that this rock might have come all the way down from there.

This river is called, rather unsurprisingly, the rivière Trinité and apparently it’s quite famous for the quality – and quantity – of the salmon that was caught in it.

It was quite popular with some first-Nation Canadians who used to live off the salmon from the river in the summer and off whales and the like from the St Lawrence during the winter. There was no reason for them to live a nomadic lifestyle.

Like most rivers out here along the North Shore, Quebec Hydro has become involved in it and has installed a little hydro-electric generating plant to serve the town and its neighbourhood.

There wasn’t very much by the way of detail to tell me anything about it but although it’s not a very big drop the force of the water makes it quite powerful so I imagine that there’s enough power here to run the village and its surroundings.

“But what about the salmon?” I hear you say. After all, it’s quite a famous salmon fishing river and one time the fishing rights were owned by a club in Quebec, although control was soon wrestled back by the villagers.

In fact, when they built the barrage they also built a kind of fish ladder at the side of it so that the salmon could move upstream and downstream . I haven’t heard whether or not it’s as successful and whether the fish are a snumerous as before.

Meanwhile, I’m back on the beach again heading east. Right over there is the fish-processing plant that we visited when we were here in 2012.

Formerly, it was the forest products that provided the major source of employment in the village. It was quite a hive of industry, with a log flume and even a small railway network, but the 1960s put an end to all of that and the economy collapsed.

Nowadays, it’s fishing and the fish processing plant that provide most of the employment opportunities around here.

One thing that Baie Trinité does have going for it is that it has a fuel station and convenience store, and you can see it peering through the trees over there, left of centre.

I went in there for a wander around and to my great surprise they sold bread. Baguettes too, albeit frozen ones that need to be thawed out before I can use them. But it’s good news for me – it’s a round trip of just 78 kms for the bread instead of 116 kms.

Out on the western side of the village is the Pointe-à-Poulin. I tried to reach there in 2012 as you may remember but was blocked by the snow.

No such problems this year though. In fact I made it all the way down to the Anse de Sable – Sandy Cove – and not only that, I was chased all the way down the road by three Dodge Caravans full of people and that made me wonder what on earth was going on. It seems to be a popular spot this year and so I shall have to make enquiries as to why they are here.

They all went over there to have a play on that big rock, that looked as if it might have been a plaque of volcanic lava. I went over to have a chat to them to see what was going on.

It appears that they were High-School students who were out on a field trip along the North Shore of the St Lawrence – and that made me wonder whether the young archaeologists whom I had seen at Godbout the other day excavating part of that cache of seashells were from the same group.

But anyway, I left them all to it and went for a wander right out to the farthest extremity of the Point.

Or at least, what I thought was the farthest extremity of the Point because each time that I came to what I thought was the farthest extremity of the Point, there was another Point around the corner. I’d heard of a similar phenomenon in mountaineering when people climbed up to what they considered to be the summit, only to find another summit further on.

having realised that I was likely to be out here all night at this rate, I turned round and retraced my steps somewhat, turning my attention to the rocks just offshore.

I went for a clamber about and a closer inspection thereof. I noticed that the rocks were not rocks at all but nice, black, smooth and shiny, so it seemed to me that these might also be plaques of lava.

You might be wondering about the likelihood of volcanic activity around the St Lawrence, but it does appear to be a recorded fact.

The St Lawrence River valley is situated more-or-less along a geological fault line and there is evidence of techtonic plate movement along here as well as some evidence of prehistoric volcanic eruptions. Coming across outcrops of lava, and even lava fused into airgaps in other rocks, is by no means unusual.

But talking of techtonic plate movement, there have been several earthquakes recorded along the St Lawrence in recent years – a score of 5 on the Richter Scale is not unknown. But this pales into insignificance when considered against the events of 1663

Many of you will remember the discussion that we had when we were at Les Eboulements. We mentioned that in that year there had been as many as 33 earthquakes along the St Lawrence, the largest of which caused an entire mountainside to slide into the river.

So leaving the lava beds for now and greeting the students, who seemed to be having endless amounts of fun, I walked right back around the bay to the other end – the end closest to Baie Trinité.

I was hoping to see a shipwreck or two, or the remains of a shipwreck maybe, but I was completely out of luck.But it really was a beautiful beach and I had quite enjoyed my time out here. Given a few more degrees of temperature and bit less wind, I could quite happily have stretched out on one of the lava beds.

Anyway, I called it a day and leapt into Strider to take me back home.

But halfway down the road before I reached Highway 138, I came to a shuddering halt along the side of the road. That was because the view of the bay that I saw as I rounded a bend was quite stunning. Now this is the kind of beach upon which I could quite happily recline in the evening sun, except of course that the sun is setting behind the trees on the left.
And in any case, I was feeling quite tired by now so I was quite keen to return home to my little room.

I made myself a coffee and retired to my room for a repose and relax before I made tea. Baked potatoes, beans and hotdogs with mustard as usual (it was a good idea to buy that bag of spuds and those tins of beans) was on the menu. And then having done the washing-up, I retired foe the night.

I was pretty exhausted after my long walk around the beach. But at least I have my bread for tomorrow.

And you have 2105 words to read tonight. Serves you all right.

Thursday 29th September 2016 – DO YOU KNOW WHAT?

I had the best night’s sleep that I had ever had.

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and I remember absolutely nothing until the alarm went off at 06:00 – with the radio on the laptop still playing. That was a deep sleep.

I came back up here after breakfast (today’s home-made jam was mango, ginger, maple syrup and saffron) just in time to see the F A Gauthier coming into view, with a bulk carrier in the background.

By the time that I had grabbed the telephoto lens she had steamed into a beautiful position and the bulk carrier was continuing her way upstream.

I wonder she is.

I didn’t do too much this morning – it’s not really possible to do too much with the internet connection here but I did what I could. Despite having had a good sleep through the night, I dozed off at some time and so was late going out. I ended up grabbing a bag of crisps instead of my butties.

I went for a walk in the other direction today, towards the west, and I came across the cemetery of the village.

I had a good nosey around at some of the graves, as I always like to do in places like this, and this lady seems to be the oldest inhabitants of the cemetery. She died in 1880, aged 27. There was a gap of a good few years between her and the next-oldest. Maybe there weren’t too many people living around here in those days.

But that wasn’t everything apparently. There was some kind of stele in the cemetery giving a list of names of people who are interred in here and whose last resting places would seem to be lost. It’s a shame that so many names haven’t been remembered too.

But this stele was clearly erected in the olden days when the original inhabitants were still being referred to as “Indians” rather than First-Nation Canadians.

By the way, it’s an error to believe that the word “Indian” when applied to people in Canada refers to the Indian sub-continent and the belief that this might have been the Indies. Jacques Cartier knew full well that it wasn’t.

The word “Indian” when applied here is an English-language corruption of the word “Indigène” which is the French word for “native inhabitant”.

Godbout has a small school here, and also a very impressive church with a presbytery. It dates from about 1908 and much to my surprise, its predecessor of 1840 didn’t actually burn down like everywhere else in Quebec but managed to survive until it was demolished at the end of 1903

I forgot to have a close look at the statue to see who she was. As you know if you have been a regular reader of this rubbish, the different saints are identified by the object with which they are depicted. This might be Saint Mary – but then on the other hand it might not.

There is a park down at the end of the road – the “Parc Intergenerationnelle”. This must be a paradise for young children, with all of the attractions that are available.

I myself would have made a bee-line for the pirate ship. This is an ideal place for the extreme youth of the village to hang out and many British people would find themselves at home here, for having voted for the Brexit they will soon find themselves all at sea.

As for the adults who didn’t vote in favour of the Brexit, there are things to do here too. My friend Liz saw the photo and asked me if this place was a playground or a gymnasium. It can quite easily be both, without any trouble at all.

I was keen to go over and have a look, and maybe a play on the apparatus but I’d wasted so much time already and I had plenty of other things to doso I couldn’t afford to hang around.

At the side of the park is the second of the two rivers here at Godbout. This is the bigger of the two, called (as you might expect) the Riviere Godbout, and nicknamed (as you might equally expect) the “Grande Riviere”. According to mine host, it’s a famous salmon river and some good fish have been taken out of it.

But the climb down the bank to the sandy beach was quite something. The steps down to the water stopped half-way down and it was quite an undignified scramble the rest of the way.

There is a reason for this, as the people whom you can see on the right-hand edge of the photograph explained to me.

Apparently there has been something of a storm that has eroded away a good part of the banks of the river, hence the beach at the bottom of the steps has gone.

However, it’s good news for these people. They are archaeologists and apparently some kind of considerable cache of seashells has been uncovered. There’s a possibility that it might be an old Innu rubbish dump and so they were busy excavating it.

The sediment that comes down the river is caught by the current of the St Lawrence River which is quite slow-moving at this point and so there’s quite a magnificent pair of sandspits.

I’ve told you before where the sand comes from. But in case you have forgotten, it’s the debris from when boulders have rubbed together as they have been transported by glaciers during the various ice ages, and when the glaciers melted, they deposited the sand on the ground.

It’s for this reason that the St Lawrence River up here, and many other rivers in the sub-arctic regions of the world have such magnificent beaches, and those of Godbout are amongst the best that I have ever encountered.

Had the wind dropped, I would have been quite happy to have sat down here with my book to relax for a while by the sea. However I had to knock that idea on the head, for I had already discovered that I had forgotten to pack my booK.

This piece of wood lying here on the beach caught my attention and I went over for a closer look. What had drawn my attention to it was that there was a good deal of what looked like worked joints in it – the kind that a carpenter might make if he had been using the wood as part of a construction.

And not only that. There were huge nails and metal pegs sticking out of where the joints are. I ended up wondering if this had been part of a shipwreck or an abandoned boat.

My guest house is called the Thépi du Bec Sucré and so it comes as no surprise to find that we have a teepee in the back garden. In the summer it’s used as a tearoom for tourists but right now it’s closed until next summer.

It does however remind me of the story of the chief of a Native American tribe who once took part in a tea-drinking competition. He broke the record, as you might expect, but was found next morning, dead in his teepee.

When I returned to my digs, I made myself a coffee and took it up to my room. Glancing out of the window I noticed something big sailing upriver towards Quebec and Montreal.

Grabbing hold of the big zoom lens and with some judicious enlargement, I was able to identify it as some kind of cruise ship.

In case you are wondering, by the way, the river is wider than it looks. So much so that during World War II a couple of U-boats were operating right here between Godbout and Matane, scoring several hits and sinking several ships in the river before making successful escapes.

And so I’ve had my tea – baked potatoes beans and hot-dogs – and now I’m having an early night.

I deserve it.

Wednesday 28th September 2016 – WELL, WHAT CAN I SAY?

Apart from the fact that this is one of the most comfortable beds that I’ve ever slept in. I didn’t take long to drop off and although I was awake again soon after (and for quite a while too) I ended up back in a deep sleep and apart from one visit down the corridor I was well away when the alarm went off.

I’m not sure about all of the layers of blankets though – I can see them giving me problems – and the beaver skin went on the floor (and if I had my way the stuffed otter would be out of the window) and it’s all very twee, with lots of ornaments and everything in just the right place. It must be a nightmare to clean and dust.

But the guy who runs it is super-friendly and I couldn’t ask for anything more than he is prepared to give. It’s a bit overwhelming in fact, because it’s a long time since I’ve been cosseted quite like this. And who knows? It’ll probably do me good.

Breakfast was at 08:00 with my notaire friend and his wife. And I made a mistake yesterday because he isn’t actually the notaire of Pontaumur but the retired notaire of Pontaumur, because he’s sold up and they are now on their travels visiting places that they have always dreamed of visiting in North America. And it’s a 6-month itinerary too, so good luck to them.

Once I’d had breakfast I came back up here for a rest and to do a few things on the laptop. And if I thought that the internet at my house was slow, then it’s like lightning compared to how it works here. And it keeps on dropping the connection too. It’s extremely difficult to work with.

Lunchtime came around and so I went downstairs to Strider to make myself some butties. And it really was windy – very unpleasant. It rather destroyed the effects of it being a beautiful sunny day. But I’m not here to do nothing and so I put on an extra fleece and set out to brave the tempest.

Here’s a nice little pavilion here on the shore, just like a little Chinese pagoda. There are a few of them dotted around here and there. That would seem to be an ideal place to eat my butties, even if the sides are opened and I’m going to be buffeted about by the wind.

I’m not sure about my book though. The pages are being blown about like nobody’s business and so I’m not going to be able to relax here.

Consequently I decide to move on.

Last night I’d seen a white light in the shape of a cross shining from somewhere in the hills. Today I can see a cross over there where the light was. My host told me that there was a path up there, with some stunning views from up on the top, and so I decided that I would go for an exploration.

It’s not quite such a climb as it might appear, because there are steps that lead up there. That should make it somewhat easier to reach the top.

Godbout is situated in a sheltered bay that is flanked by two rivers. This is the river at the eastern edge of the town, the smaller one of the two, and I’ll tell you its name in a minute when I can remember it or whenever I can track it down.

But there’s a footpath that leads over the bridge and along the top of the shore in the general direction of the cross that I saw, and so I headed out along here as a good place to start.

I stumble across a flight of stairs heading up the side of the mountain and so I start to climb up there. This must be the way to the cross.

It was pretty tiring climbing all the way up here because there are quite a few and I lost count long before the top. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath and I do have to say that the view down to the eastern beach at Godbout was stunning from this position. I bet it’s even better from the top.

403 steps in fact, according to the number carved into the top step, brought me up to the very top where I could see the cross. It’s actually an aerial or antenna support which was rather disappointing because I was hoping that it might have been a Cartier cross.

There were crosses erected all over the cost of the Gasoé peninsula and the shore of the St Lawrence at the places where it is believed that Jacques Cartier landed on his voyages of exploration during the 1530s.

But it goes without saying that if he had landed at every place so claimed, he would still be out there now.

And I was right about the view from the top and its a shame that I have the sun shining into the camera lens – the camera can never do justice to the real view.

That’s the view of Godbout down there with the harbour in centre view. You can see how beautiful the area is here and I’m glad that I managed to make it up to the top of the stairs to see it.

And so here I sat for half an hour or so to read my book and to catch my breath.

Back down to the bottom of the steps (with 399 carved at the bottom so something is clearly not correct) I walked on along the road and came to this beautiful belvedere with a view out across the river.

Here I fell in with a very vocal local yokel who spent quite a while chatting to me. he said that he was driving past here in 2002 when his car broke down. While it was being repaired he walked around the village, fell in love with it and once his car had been repaired, he came back later and bought a house here.

While we were busy chatting, the F A Gauthier came steaming … "dieseling" – ed … into port, making quite an impressive photograph.

I told you that she’s the first brand-new ferry on the St Lawrence for a good number of years, but I didn’t tell you that she was built in Italy – which must have been a major blow to Canadian shipbuilders, and also to John Brown’s of Greenock who have built many ships for the St Lawrence in the past.

But anyway, here she is. She’s 133 metres long and 22.4 metres wide, displacing about 16,000 tonnes, although she might not look it.

There’s a carrying capacity of 800 passengers and 180 vehicles, which means that the queue of unreserved vehicles that used to miss the boat on the Camille Marcoux and which we almost joined when we were here in 2014 may well be a thing of the past.

My vocal local yokel told me that there were the remains of the village’s old hydro-electric plant somewhere along the trail. I wanted to have a look at them if I could and so I set out to see if I could find them.

But I was defeated by the steepness of the climb up into the hills and the looseness of the rocks on the trail – by the time that I was halfway up I was going up one pace and sliding down three. However, there was a beautiful view of the docks and the F A Gauthier from where I was standing.

I walked back to my digs via the beach. There weren’t many people about (I counted two) but it was beautiful along here despite the wind that had sprung up once again.

And I did what I had wanted to do by coming here, which was to have a good wash in the water of the St Lawrence. It’s a rather symbolic gesture that I like to perform, and as this might be the last time that I come here, I was keen to do it.

By now I was thoroughly exhausted and so I went back to my room where I crashed out for a good while, aching all over.

And for tea, I was organising my potatoes for baking but my host told me that he had cut far too many chips, so would I like to cook them with my sausages and beans? That was extremely nice of him and it made a nice change from baked potatoes. Only drawback was that I forgot that I had some malt vinegar for them.

And that was that. I came up to my room and I was out like a light – probably gone for good.

Tuesday 27th September 2016 – NO PRIZES …

… for guessing where I am and what I’m doing today.

Of course, there’s only one reason why I would ever want to come to Matane, apart from meeting the man whose limericks never would scan, and that is for the traversier – the ferry that sets sail out of there across to the north shore of the St Lawrence, either to Baie Comeau or to Godbout. And whenever I seem to be on board it, it always seems to be going to Godbout.

And much to my surprise, we have a brand-new ferry. The Camille Marcoux has finally been laid up in the city of Quebec after almost 43 years of service, looking for a new owner.

What we have now is the F A Gauthier and when I say that she is a new ferry, she really is too because, unlike most “new” ferries that have made their appearance in Canadian waters these last few years, she’s not a second-hand boat but brand spanking new, built in 2014.

I was up quite early at the motel – at 06:00 on the dot and at 06:15 I was on my way out ready to put myself in the queue for loading.

And they won’t forget me in a hurry at that motel either. With the kind of presents that I an capable of leaving behind me, I managed to block the toilet and I had to ask for the maintenance crew. That’ll larn ’em.

Now, I have talked in the past … "and at great length too" – ed … about the folly of using steel culverts for streams underneath new road workings and we’ve seen plenty of examples of how they have rotted away and the road has collapsed.

I’ve often said that despite the costs of transport, the use of concrete culverts would save them a lot of money and inconvenience in the long run.

And clearly they have been reading my notes these days because there were several lorry-loads of concrete culverts parked up in the queue to board the boat. If they really are for replacing some of the rotten steel culverts underneath the highway, that can only be good news for the future.

They weren’t the only exciting things waiting to board the ferry either. This is a railway wagon, presumably for the transport of ore.

There are several lengths of isolated railway line on the north shore of the St Lawrence River and in the past we’ve seen the ones at Baie Comeau, Sept-Iles, Port Cartier and Havre St Pierre. I imagine that this is on its way out to one of those lines – although there are rail ferries over to Baie Comeau and to Sept Iles.

It’s been a good while since we’ve had a Ship of the Day and so I didn’t miss out on the opportunity to photograph this Canada Steamship Lines bulk carrier that was heading upstream, with the village of Godbout in the background.

Unfortunately I couldn’t read her name from here even with magnifying the photo, and without knowing to which port it was heading, I wasn’t able to track it down on one of the ship tracking sites that I know. She will have to remain anonymous.

Over there is the village of Godbout. That’s the destination of the ferry and where we will all spill out.

You’ve probably read what I have written about the north shore of the St Lawrence and for me, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. I desperately wanted to come here while I still could and I am lucky to have been able to make it while my health is still holding out. It’s important to me.

We were heaved out of the F A Gauthier after a crossing of 2 hours and 15 minutes, which cost (for the benefit of UK Channel-hoppers) a mere $45:00 for Strider and me. That gave me an opportunity to drive around to the side of the ship and take a photo of it.

And in cse you are wondering just who F A Gauthier might have been when he was at home (if he ever was), he was a Quebecois who once stood on the toe of an Anglophone tourist.

And for that heroic act of Francophone defiance, the Quebec authorities will ensure that his name will live on for ever (given how often they replace the ferries around here).

It took me ages to find the place where I had booked to stay. It’s called one name on the internet but there’s another name over the door and that was what confused me.

My arrival was expected but it was quite early – 09:30 in fact – and so the previous tenants were still having breakfast. My room wasn’t ready either and so there was no point in hanging around. I decided to head off to Baie Comeau to do some shopping and to fuel up.

I had a rather depressing incident at Franquelin. Franquelin is a small village in a cove along the coast between Godbout and Baie Comeau, and to reach there, there’s a stunningly steep descent into the village, and right at the bottom is a 50kph speed limit. It’s impossible to slow down to the speed limit by the time you reach the sign.

Just after the speed limit sign is an alley. And in there was a Quebec County Mountie with a radar gun.

Of course he took off after me, but much to my astonishment he overtook me and continued to drive onwards. That took me completely by surprise, I can tell you. I couldn’t be this lucky, could I?

In Baie Comeau, my friendly neighbourhood petrol pump attendant wasn’t on duty at the Ultramar which was a disappointment, and then I went over to Tim Horton’s for a coffee. I hadn’t had one since on the boat.

Once I’d organised that, I went to the IGA and did a little shopping. And then I headed back towards Godbout, stopping on the way to eat my butty.

Here on Highway 138 – the Route des Baleines – there were several roadworks and it too hours to negotiate them. I could have sat, made my butties and eaten them in the time that it took me to negotiate them.

And that vehicle heading towards us from down at the bottom of the hill is a new Ford Transit. We encountered quite a few of them last year as they are also sold in North America, replacing the old Ford F-250.

Globalisation is, unfortunately, even catching up with White Van-Man.

So now I’m installed in my comfy digs, and here’s the view out of my bedroom window – a little canted over to one side as the ferry is directly oppoite which willcome in handy when I’m rushing for the boat.

I have a small double room with a very comfortable bed, and I share a bathroom. I also have use of the kitchen, which is quite useful, because apart from a very ephemeral canteen, there is absolutely nothing whatever in the way of facilities in the village.

And that suits me fine. It’s what I’ve come here to find. I made myself baked potatoes, beans and hot dogs instead.

And we’ve talked about globalisation just now, and how it’s catching up with us. You may or may not believe what I am going to tell you now, and if you don’t believe it I don’t blame you because I didn’t believe it at first.

However truth is far more strange than fiction, and so it is with no qualms at all that I tell you that my co-habitee in the second guest room here is the notaire from Pontaumur, just 30kms away from where I live in France.

You couldn’t make that up either.

Monday 26th September 2016 – I MUST HAVE BEEN …

… tired last night. I was in bed at 20:00 and away with the fairies straight away for a good half hour. It didn’t take long. But I couldn’t stay asleep and the next hour or so saw me lying there reading a book. Eventually though, I closed my eyes and there I was, gone. And apart from one trip down the corridor, I remember nothing whatsoever until the alarm went off at 06:00.

It took me quite a while to gather my wits and then I set to and tidied up my things because I’m moving on today. I’m feeling better today so I want to take advantage of it while I can. Rachel and I had breakfast together and then I loaded up Strider and we set off.

A brief stop at the tyre depot for a coffee and chat with everyone there, and then I hit the road northwards. At Grand Sault I stopped for fuel and then headed off cross-country towards the Baie des Chaleurs. At Kedgwick I stopped to buy a baguette and I’m glad that I did because they were at half-price in the sale. I stopped off a little further on at a nice quiet spot off the road, right up in the hills, and ate lunch.

Near Atholville I came out of the mountains and this was where I had to make a decision. I was planning to look for a motel here – it’s been a long drive from Centreville – but as I was still feeling up for continuing so I diverted myself up the Matapedia valley and into Quebec.

One thing about Quebec is that no-one obeys the speed limits. It’s 90kph on the main roads and I had the cruise control set accordingly. And after about 30 miles through the mountains I had a queue of about 20 vehicles – lorries and all sorts – right behind me in a long crocodile. But when I turned off at Amqui to head north, I left them all behind.

Matane was my destination, and how peeved was I when I pulled in there. The ferry across the Gulf of St Lawrence was just pulling out – wouldn’t it have been something had I arrived here an hour earlier? I could have been well and truly gone, and quite by accident too. But never mind, hey?

I had a little errand to do here, and then I went to look for accommodation. My choice of motel – the cheap one on the waterfront, was closed for the season, as you might expect, and so I had to look elsewhere. By now I was feeling rather out of it, having driven about 450 kms today, and so I ended up in somewhere expensive. And expensive it was too, because I have stayed in many better places and for much less money too. And I would even miss breakfast, because that starts at 06:30 and I’ll be gone by then.

There was no microwave in the room either, and so I had to look elsewhere for food. A tour around Matane, which took me past a few motels that would have been much better than where I was staying, found me a pizza place where they did me a pizza – one which was quite expensive but which was one of the best that I have ever eaten.

So now I’m settling down in my room (and I do have to admit that the bed is super-comfortable) ready for my really early start tomorrow.

Wednesday 7th September 2016 – WHAT A GOOD DECISION …

… that was, to book into that hotel at the back of the coach station.

I was stark out as soon as I laid down my weary head. We did have an interruption at about 23:45 when a baby started to cry, but that can happen in the best of places and it was a thing of five minutes. And then I needed to make a trip down to the corridor at about 03:00. I finally came to my senses, such as they are, at 04:45, having had a good night’s sleep in this extremely comfortable bed. The night porter’s call at 05:00 was therefore rather superfluous but it was nice to know that it was available and that it works.

But I’ll tell you this – $30-odd less per night than sleeping out at an airport hotel and while the comfort is rather less, I don’t need most of the difference. For the time and money that I save and for the convenience of being in the city centre, if I do ever make it back to Montreal I’ll be coming here, even if it does involve a 500-metre drag of the suitcase. And remember – when I stayed in Lille the other year I dragged it farther than that – and uphill too!

Let’s face it. It’s seen better days, this hotel, but I had a good shower, a really comfortable sleep, and no-one stole my boots. What more do you need?

I was too early for breakfast of course, but that can’t be helped. My bus was more important. I was at the coach station in no time flat and a friendly security guard unlocked the door to the left-luggage room and took my voucher so that I could recover my suitcase and Strawberry Moose, and we took our place in the queue, chatting to a guy who said he was a scouser, although he sounded more Northern Irish to me.

The trip to Sainte-Foy, on the edge of the city of Quebec, took just under three hours and I spent the time in half-asleep mode. After all, it was quite early in the morning. And it’s a good job that I didn’t go to sleep (or is it?) because this bus apparently goes right out to Sept Iles, somewhere else where we’ve been before and where I can catch a train to Labrador.

But when we reached our destination – Sainte Foy, not Sept Iles – a couple of mugs of coffee and a few rounds of toast and jam revived my spirits somewhat, although I’m not sure that you really need to say more than once that you don’t want butter on your toast.

But what’s this all about? That chewing gum was disgusting – $2:00 for three slices and it tasted of nothing but rubber. As for the viagra however, I tried that once many years ago whilst in the company of the much – maligned Percy Penguin, who didn’t appear in these pages anything like as often as she deserved to back in those days. And I clearly didn’t swallow the viagra quickly enough – I had a stiff neck for a week.

And you all know that the wish that I have about my departure is to go suddenly while in the arms of a nubile nymphet a third of my age. Were I to be lucky enough to find a willing volunteer, the viagra would come in handy in those circumstances. But it would take them three days before they could put the lid on the coffin.

Coming over the Pont Pierre Laporte, which we’ve visited before, there was a ship a-sailing … "a-dieseling, you mean" – ed … by, up the river towards Montreal. It’s too far away to see what it is, but it’s the only likely candidate for today’s Ship of the Day and so we’ll include it in here.

We’ll see if we can identify it at a later date when I can access the record of the Port of Montreal … "he couldn’t" – ed.

But on the subject of Pierre Laporte, the whole world is currently up in arms about what they perceive as brown-skinned terrorism, but never forget that Pierre Laporte, a leading Canadian politician, was kidnapped and brutally murdered in cold blood by white-skinned Catholic terrrorists during a major terrorism in Canada – and some of the perpetrators of the crise d’Octobre were given a free passage to Cuba by the craven Canadian Government.

And not only that, some modern-day Quebec politician proposed to erect a plaque in their honour. Yes, and the Canadians complain about brown-skinned terrorists. You couldn’t make this up, could you?

But now the bus is in, and it’s two hours from Sainte-Foy to Riviere du Loup.

So feeling a bit more like it after the coffee, I did a pile of paperwork on the laptop and listened to some good music to pass the time. I’m in Traffic mode right now and I had a good listen to Sometimes I Feel So Uninspired from the magnificent On The Road album, because that’s just how I’m feeling right now. And if he can play a lead guitar solo like the last four minutes of that track when he’s feeling do uninspired, whatever could he do if he were to have some inspiration?

By the time I got to Phoe … errr … Riviere du Loup I wasn’t all that far behind where I wanted to be. But we were late and the connecting bus was already in so I had no chance to buy something to eat and drink. Luckily, I still had a packet of the vegan crisps that Alison had bought for me in Belgium and which had survived the voyage across the Atlantic. They didn’t survive the voyage down to Edmunston anyway.

And our Holland Hurricane has internet available and I can actually configure it to work. All I need now is a few people on line to talk to, but as soon as all of my friends see me come on line, they all clear off rather smartish-like.

We had a 15-minute stop at Edmundston (it’s nice to be back in New Brunswick anyway. Home Sweet Home, an hour in front of Quebec time of course) which was plenty of time to visit the gentleman’s rest room and to pick up a coffee. That’s me organised now for the two hour journey that remains.

Much to my – and everyone else’s – surprise, the bus was bang on time to the minute on its arrival at Florenceville. Rachel, my niece, was already there and waiting and so that was ideal. She had a few errands to perform and then it was off to Centreville and the tyre depot. Rachel went on to do some more errands and I came back here with Darren and Amber.

First task was to sort out Strider. He’s been in his little hidey-hole since last October and needed to see the light of day. Even though the battery had had the odd trickle-charge it was a little flaky so that will need to be replaced, and the tyres were down. And not just that, but some creature or other had made a nest with the soundproofing from underneath the bonnet. But it’s good to be back behind the wheel of Strider again – just like old times and as soon as I can resolve this continuing insurance issue we’ll be in business.

Darren and I had quite a chat but I eventually called it a night. It’s far too much for me these days. It’s amazing just how tired you become doing nothing but sitting around all day on a bus.

And it’s nice to see some friendly faces, but a couple of weeks with me will soon take care of all of that.

Tuesday 6th September 2016 – “WELL ON THE WAY …

… to the Land of Nod” I said, didn’t I? And at 21:45 too.

And there I stayed until almost 04:00 before i had to disappear off down the corridor. Over 6 hours of continuous sleep is a miracle these days and I’m well-pleased with that. It’s been ages since I’ve been like that – it just tells you how tired I really was.

And that’s not all either. I got back into bed and I was gone again for another hour or so too – and quite right too if you ask me.

First downstairs for breakfast again, and then back up here to do some work, as well as a long chat with a friend on the laptop. The internet is a marvellous tool for this kind of thing and I wonder however we managed without it.

All of this took me until about 10:40 and I had to finish then because there was a shuttle that someone had ordered to take them back to the airport and I had hitched a ride on it. It wasn’t as if I was working to a timetable and so it wasn’t worth ordering one just for myself, even if it is a free service. And so off we set and it doesn’t take long to reach there from here.

And it looks as if the Societe de Transports de Montreal has been spending its money too. In the past, the 747 – the bus that connects the airport to the city centre – was just an ordinary service bus. But now, we have some big six-wheeled Prevost tour buses doing the runs and that’s certainly progress.

Of a sort anyway, because the legendary 25-minute white knuckle ride into the city is over.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s there was a massive investment in the infrastructure of Montreal. But the work was blighted by problems of overspending, over-time and, shame as it is to say it, all kinds of corruption. All of the concrete work that was done in those days is falling apart as you can see in this photo and this is by no means the worst example – just one that was clearly visible right by where the bus happened to stop.

As a result, huge sections of the overhead motorway network have been taken out of service to be repaired and in some cases it looks as if some sections have been demolished. And that means that our journey took about three times as long as it would otherwise have done.

I’m glad now that I didn’t rely on public transport to bring me into the city early tomorrow morning. As a long-distance traveller I’ve always believed in being as close to my destination as possible as early as possible, and you can understand why.

So here I am at the bus station, and there’s a left-luggage place here. It’s $10 to leave an item here for 24 hours but I’m not going all around the city lugging the giant suitcase around with me and I certainly don’t want to be staggering around with it at 05:00 tomorrow morning. Here it stays.

I didn’t stay though. I headed off to the Galeries Desjardins in the rue Sainte Catherine – and for several reasons too.

there’s a Subway in the basement and I’m hungry. What with the delay on the bus it’s lunchtime already and my stomach feels as if my throat has been cut. I managed to eat this one too without dropping it on the floor.
it’s steaming hot again and there’s a sorbet store just across the road. The coconut milk sorbet was beautiful although they were a bit stingy with it, but the chocloate sorbet was disgusting and it was all that I could do to finish it. I won’t be having that again.
there’s a metro station down in the bowels of the place and this is where I want. I’m on the move again.

The metro takes me to the terminus right out at Honore-Beaugrand and there I leap aboard a 28 bus that pulls up right on cue. This is going to take me out to the rue Jarry Est and my storage locker. My credit card expired a few weeks ago and a payment has been missed and I don’t want them to foreclose on contents of it.

It’s a nice drive out through the outer suburbs of the city and then round across the motorway to the industrial section of the east end. The friendly driver shows me where my stop is but I recognised it anyway.

And now we have another problem – and that is that my UK credit card – which is in credit as always when I go off on a wander – has been blocked. "Unusual spending patterns" probably, which is just an excuse for saying that they don’t want me to spend any money so that the bank can keep it. I mean – it’s not an unusual spending pattern at all, is it? Every year at this time of the year I come here.

Still, I’ve been expecting this ever since I was stranded in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. I make sure that I have other cards with me and I’ve even opened an account in a Canadian bank. We can soon resolve this issue – but it’s darned annoying all the same.

Back outside to the bus stop on the other side of the road and it’s the same driver on the return run. We both recognised each other and we had a little chat. That passes the time of day and we’re soon back at Honore-Beaugrand, just in time to be swamped by schoolchildren. It must be chucking-out time already. But then again, we did go a long way out of the city.

I alight at Berri-UQAM and head round to the rue Saint Hubert and the Hotel Bon Accueil.

It’s quite a modern building – dating from the 80s I reckon – but I bet that the rooms haven’t seen a lick of paint since then – it’s quite down-at-heel. But the place is spotlessly clean, there’s air-conditioning, a fridge and the bed feels oh! So comfortable! So much so in fact that I’m well-away with the fairies for an hour or so. And quite right too.

But I can’t stay here for ever no matter how nice it feels. I need to be on my way.

Another advantage of the hotel is that right at the end of the street is the Place Emilie Gamelin.

She was a nun who had a convent here but that was demolished to become the site of the Berri-UQAM metro station and underneath all of the grass and greenery is a concrete pad which is actually the roof of the station.

If I do decide to come back to the hotel here, this place would be nice to come to sit to with a book and a cold drink if I don’t feel up to going for a wander around the city. It’s nice to have a garden close by

But I don’t have time to stop here and enjoy the sun this afternoon. We have things to do.

Our next stop is what is for me the most beautiful building in Montreal – the Gare Viger, which was formerly the old Canadian Pacific Railway terminus.

Canadian Pacific abandoned all of its operations east of Montreal back in the 1980s (hence the reason that I’m obliged to leave the city on the coach) and this majestic building was left to decay. At one time there was even talk at one time of demolishing it, but it seems that good aesthetic taste has prevailed and they are actually doing something with it. And just as well too because it would be a disaster if this place fell by the wayside.

Down to the river next to see if there’s anything loading or unloading at the grain terminals. Montreal’s fortunes were built on the grain that was brought in from the Prairies by the railway and shipped out to Europe down the Saint Lawrence.

And we’re in luck. Not the best Ship of the Day but the first one so far. It’s so far away that I can’t read its name from here (yes I can if I enlarge the image – she’s the Manitoba, or Personitoba as I suppose we have to say these days).

She’s an old laker, as you can tell from the bridge that is right on the bows of the ship. These ships sail around the Great Lakes and through the canals as far as here, and the reason that the bridge is so far forward is that the captain can have a good view of the entry to the locks into which the ship must sail.

And I do mean "old", by the way. As in 1967 as it happens and that’s an extraordinary age for a cargo ship. She’s a bulk carrier of 10902 tonnes, registered in Hamilton on the shores of Lake Ontario and, for a period up to 2011, was known as the Maritime Trader.

According to her manifests, she seems to spend a great deal of time travelling between Port Colborne on Lake Erie and Port Cartier down the Gulf of St Lawrence which we visited in 2012. It looks as if she’s in the ore business then.

Seeing as how we were talking of bridges just now … "well, one of us was" – ed … how about this for a bridge?

It’s the custom, as we know, for important geographical features to be named after their discoverer, and so I wonder what Jacques Cartier said when he sailed up the St Lawrence to here on 2nd October 1535 and saw this magnificent bridge spanning the river. He must have been so impressed, just as I was the first time that I saw it.

It’s a beautiful evening and not cooling down very much so I go for another stroll along the riverside.

Over there is where I should have been yesterday had that music concert not interrupted my plans. That’s the Ile Sainte Helene and that’s the belvedere where there’s an excellent view of the city at night when everywhere is all lit up. I’ll manage without a photo from there though for this year. You never know – I might be back in Montreal yet again if I can continue to fight off this illness.

But just a few words about the island. During World War II it was the site of a prisoner-of-war camp that earned something of an evil reputation due to the severe fashion that the German soldiers were treated in there. It later it became the site of the 1967 World’s Fair – Expo ’67, which, seeing as this was the the period of a considerable amount of major Quebecois terrorism, was known throughout the world as Explo ’67.

Further around the waterfront in the old docks is another ship.

Actuallly she’s a goelette, the Grosse Ile and she claims to be the last working goelette on the Saint Lawrence. She was bought as something not too far removed from a rotting hulk in 1992 and it took 20 years to restore.

Her work these days seems to be nothing more than taking tourists for a couple of laps around the harbour, and I could have been tempted, but I didn’t have the Crown Jewels with me so I let the opportunity pass me by.

Now I bet that you are all dying to know what a goelette is, aren’t you? And so you need to cast your minds back 50 years and more. In those days, most of the settlements along the banks of the St Lawrence were either fishing villages or lumber camps, and there was no road connection between them. Instead, there were the goelettes that sailed along the river from a railhead and worked a chain of these isolated communities, dropping off supplies and picking up the fish or whatever.

There are still several isolated communities like that these days and you may remember coming with me in May 2012 on an icebreaker, smashing our way through the pack-ice out to an isolated island down in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

From here I trudged wearily, because I’m in wearily trudging mode by now, to the metro. It’s my last night in Montreal so I’m going to have a big blow-out.

Quite literally too, because there’s a superb Indian restaurant right by the Snowdon metro station and that’s where I’m heading. Vegetable samosas followed by a potato, spinach and mint curry with boiled rice and a naam bread and that was me well-and-truly stuffed. As I have said before, it’s the best Indian meal that I have ever had outside Stoke-on-Trent.

Another one of the advantages of being in a hotel in the city centre is that travelling time is so much less. Instead of 20:45 it was more like 20:15 when I was home. This meant that I was all done and dusted, in and out of the shower and all tucked up in a comfortable bed by 20:45.

And if I’m going to have to be up tomorrow at 05:00, then I need to be, too. I’m not looking forward to this one little bit.

Saturday 11th June 2016 – YESTERDAY AFTERNOON …

… I sat down and sent off a whole ruck of e-mails about accommodation, asking for appointments to view for this weekend. And how many replies do you think that I’ve received?

Krys guessed right (good old Krys!). She said “none”. As I have said many times before … "and you’ll say many times again" – ed … there is no such thing as a recession. There is just a whole load of people who are letting all kinds of income-generating opportunities melt away before their very eyes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall dozens of similar occurrences – solar panel suppliers in March 2009, caravan suppliers in July 2015 – two examples that spring readily to mind.

And not forgetting two suppliers of slide-in camper units for Strider whom I visited, one in New Hampshire and the other one in Quebec – and asked them to send me quotes for the Spring so that I could order one ready for the summer. That’s an order worth over $12,500, would you believe, but it’s too much trouble for any of the sales staff to reply to me.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. I have better things to do.

Like waking up at 07:00, long before the alarm, finding out that two of my friends are on line already, and having a chat that went on to … errr … 13:00, with me missing breakfast. And then just as I was about to nip off, Liz came on-line for a chat and so I was here for another 90 minutes.

Not that I am complaining, of course. Far from it. It’s nice to see friends and chat aimlessly for ages. I’d much rather chat to a friend than eat breakfast. That’s much more important.

And so I eventually made it out to buy a baguette for lunch. Dunno if I mentioned that yesterday I finally discovered a boulangerie so I went there first. But by that time they had long-since sold out. I ended up at the Bio-Planet where I bought a lovely artisanal baguette, sampled a pile of delights and had two free cups of coffee. You have your money’s worth in the Bio-Planet.

Back here in my room it was stifling, but I’ve managed at long last to force the window so that now I can open it, and listen to the arrival of a serious rainstorm as the weather has broken.

But not before I went out to make my tea. The chick peas left over from Thursday had gone off already and so I ended up with pasta, tinned vegetables with chick-peas already mixed in, and tinned mushrooms followed by the usual pudding.

Tomorrow will be an exciting day for me as I’m taking all of my possessions to my new digs in Leuven. I hope that they are okay but for the money that I’m paying to stay there, I’m not expecting too much. It’s all a question of money’s worth, as you all know already. I’ll put up with inconvenience if I’m not paying very much – I’m on the economy package.

So i’ll clear off now and listen to the rain. It sounds lovely outside.

Thursday 24th March 2016 – BACK IN THE NETHERLANDS

That’s right – I’ve left my comfy little spec at Paul’s Hotel this morning and headed east – in the driving rain.

But while we’re on the subject of the hotel, the breakfast that I had this morning was excellent. The coffee was beautiful for a start, and so was the bread and jam. I even had a comfy hour or so in the lounge while I did some work on the laptop that needed doing. In other words, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay here and although it was expensive, I had my money’s worth.

I’d travelled miles while I’d been asleep. Having been awoken by attack after attack after attack of cramp (which I’m very sad to see has returned after all this time), we started off with a sporting hero – a motorcycle racer or someone. He had an agent and also a manager. He was doing some business with his manager that involved making payments and he always made those payments promptly and always in cash with no problems whatever. One day he was in a rush to go somewhere and so he ordered a sandwich so the manager arranged to buy it. It came to €6:99 so the hero searched through his pockets to try to find something so the agent put down €7:00. The manager said that he would give back the €0:01 next time they would see each other. But the motorcyclist then went out to race, but was killed. This gave rise to the legend about him that his manager gave nothing and took everything, whereas the motorcyclist gave €0:01 and also gave his life.
So valiantly fighting off another attack of cramp, I was out in Labrador City, but it wasn’t Labrador City but a kind of linear village in the High Arctic, all along some kind of track. We’d gone there to take the supplies and the girl with whom I had gone, she had gone in front in an open-topped bulldozer-type vehicle to clear the route and I was in the closed-up vehicle bring the supplies behind because the girl said that it would be warmer. When we arrived, we were besieged by people who were after their stuff. We were talking to a woman there who was telling us about Pingu the Penguin who was some kind of local hero – everyone watched him on television. It turned out that an old girlfriend of mine, Robina, was living out there and I thought that that would be nice – I’ve not seen her for forty years. I hoped that she would come for her supplies. However, she didn’t come. Loads of others did so though – people with children and they were all talking about Pingu the Penguin. There was also a soap opera broadcast twice a day – 06:00 and 18:00, all about young people falling in love and I suddenly remembered something that I had written about this subject – a fictional story. I thought that it might possibly have been a script for this programme. We all had quite a chat about that too. One of the small boys asked me where I lived and I told him about my house – Hankelow Hall, although I called it something else. How we squatted there although I was in one of the outbuildings. We moved on from the town and ended up in the graveyard. Someone had been stealing one of the bulldozers on a regular basis and flattening the graves. One grave was an expensive grave for a person who had founded the Hobey’s (whoever they might be) chain of whatever and this grave was a particular target, having been flattened a few times and graffiti drawn in the soil such as “I used to work at Hobey’s”. Everyone in the town was disturbed by this and they had been unable to catch the culprit and stop them flattening this cemetery again and again.
Having managed to avoid another attack of cramp, I was back in Virlet, but it wasn’t Virlet as I know it. There were lots of ruined, abandoned houses all together. I was there with mine and Liz was there with hers and we were talking about selling and going off somewhere else. We went to an estate agent, who turned out to be Lieneke, to try to sell our properties for us. We had had all kinds of people coming to visit and they had asked all kinds of stupid questions so I reckoned that I ought to open a “stupid questions” file. I had to contact the mayor, who was in fact Rebecca from the OU, and find out all of the answers to these stupid questions. That would save everyone so much time. We were having quite a chat about this on the telephone and Lieneke went away. It was pretty close to Easter at this point and suddenly three or four caravans turned up and parked on some land at an abandoned house. Loads and loads of hippies arrived and installed themselves there, about 100 yards from my house. Lieneke asked me what I thought about all of these hippies. I said that I had nothing against them and they were entitled to their own lifestyle and it was sometimes a good thing because they can bring new ideas and new ways of thinking into a stagnant region, but they can saturate an area. I didn’t want 100 hippies living in an area like this. There was a programme on TV and I had been wanting to see it for quite some weeks, which is not like me. The village café had a bar so I had arranged to meet Liz somewhere so we had agreed on the café and I went there way earlier to watch this programme. I was sitting on a chair with a coffee watching this when I local turned up and sat down by me. He started to discuss this programme with me, which is what I didn’t want to do, and to my surprise, this person had some really intelligent points to make about it. And it was only something boring, like a quiz game.
Once more, after another disturbance, I was back in my house, which resembled something like my old apartment at Reyers, with someone who might have been June. Someone had arrived during the night and was ill and so had been put into one of the spare bedrooms (I didn’t even have one bedroom in Reyers – it was a studio!). This person needed me to help him recover and so I took him a breakfast tray and went to see how he was. It took ages to find the door into the room – I don’t know why – and so I knocked on the window to let him know I was there, and then tried again to find the door. It took a while to do that but eventually there I was. I said to the guy that I hoped that I hadn’t disturbed him too early but he laughed and pointed out that it was now just after 16:00 – I’d slept all that time! I sat down by the man and asked him about himself, but he apologised for wasting my time – it turned out to be only a simple headache and now he was feeling much better and didn’t need my services. At this point, June said that a weekend’s rest would do him good – why didn’t he come down to her place with a group of her people and play in a scrabble tournament? He liked the idea but the stakes (they were gambling – so much per point) were quite elevated and it ruled me out. But something that he said had made my ears prick up. It was quite a disreputable project so June wasn’t at all keen and quite rightly so, but hidden away underneath a fairground carousel was one of the very first Citroen 2CVs and that was the prize. But it was all weighing heavily down on me. I was 60 and I should have retired back in February and it was now the month of May. I needed to get away so I told June that I was going to see Stevie Smith, my old boss from way back, and tell him that I was leaving in three weeks time. She thought that I was being crazy, especially seeing that I was still being paid.

Back on the road, and we’ve started off with a major tragedy too. The battery in the Nikon D5000 seems to have died a death.

It was pretty flaky yesterday, I noticed, even though it had been fully-charged. And today, it just wouldn’t work at all – keeping on telling me that it’s flat. Which it isn’t of course because 2 minutes in the charger and the “fully-charged” light comes on.

The camera itself has never been the same since I dropped it in Quebec in 2012 and so I suspect that half of the problem is not with the battery but with the camera – maybe the contacts are slightly bent out of shape. But anyway, now (or, at least, when I return home) is the moment to upgrade the camera – something that I have been threatening to do for quite a while.

You’ll have to make do with some photos taken on the camera phone, such as this one.

The area where we are is an open shoreline with miles of flat land behind it, and has easy access to the port of Antwerp. It’s therefore quite heavily-fortified to protect it from invasion from the sea or from the Netherlands border and the fortifications still remain even today, like all over this coastline.

I’d bought a baguette, which was one of the nicest that I have ever eaten, but also one of the most expensive too. And I headed off via Cadzand to Breskens to sit on the estuary to eat my butty.

This is exactly the same spot where I ate my butty yesterday, but you can see the difference in the weather.

It really is wet, grey and miserable today and the wind is fairly strong. And you still can’t see very much through the fog. I’d love to tell you more about the ship that’s sailing past but I can’t make it out.

There are probably 1000 other ships out there too, but I don’t have a chance of seeing them.

After lunch, I headed off and found the bored tunnel under the Scheldt. It cosy €5:00 to go through, which I don’t suppose is too bad seeing as it’s 6.6kms long, and Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I sang a few songs and played a game of hide and seek with the tunnel in order to cheer it up.

The weather brightened up on Walcheren and wasn’t too bad at all by the time I arrived at Zoutelande. I quickly found a hotel, the price of which for five days bed and breakfast would have bought a hotel in France. But there’s parking here for Caliburn (it’s expensive to leave it on the street), I was tired and about ready to crash out. And it is Easter weekend anyway and the town is crowded.

After an hour’s sleep I went for a walk – in the rain because it was heaving down. There doesn’t seem to be a fritkot here either but at least there are a couple of pizza places and I have some vegan cheese.

I won’t need much rocking tonight, that’s for sure.

Monday 21st March 2016 – SO OFF I SET …

… from Ice-Station Zebra at 09:15, straight into the Intermarché over the road for a tomato and baguette to go with my vegan cheese for lunch. And of course, with it being Monday, there was no fresh bread. Still, start as you mean to go on, hey?

But I got my own back on the hotel for the miserable night that I’d had here. I helped myself to an extra mug of coffee, an extra orange juice and a third lump of bread to go with the jam – so saving on the heating didn’t save them anything in the long run. But as I have said before, at €35 per night plus €5:00 for the breakfast, I have no reason whatever to complain.

The drive up to Leuven was totally uneventful except that it took ages to find a boulangerie, but it was well worth the wait as the bread was beautiful. And I almost lost my way in Maubeuge, so much has it changed since I was last here years and years ago. But one thing that I discovered was that just half-an-hour from where I spent the night, on the outskirts of Laon, is an “Ibis Budget” hotel. More expensive than where I spent last night, to be sure, but the heating will probably work and they do have private facilities. As well as that, Laon has a very interesting history and is one of the places on the list of “towns to see before I die”. Consequently, I have made a note of the hotel.

But I’ve forgotten what a dirty, depressing place Belgium is. You can see it as soon as you cross the border. And the roads can match the worst that Labrador and Northern Quebec can offer. They are a disgrace to the western world. I can see now why I left the place as soon as I could.

So while I’m stopped at Heverlee Services eating my butty, let me tell you about last night’s travels.

We started off with something to do with a sandbank in the English Channel. It was only visible at low tides and then only on occasion, and there was one permanent settlement on there, with ust one permanent inhabitant. Although it was a British possession, it was accessible by some kind of causeway from the French mainland. You could see by some kind of heat-map or similar that the English Channel was very low in places and that there were these semi-submerged sandbanks all over the place.
But from there I was on my holidays, in a chalet on a sand dune somewhere. There was some bad feeling here at this place and I was the centre of it for some reason. I’d heard that some people were planning to attack me when I returned home, but I was out for a walk and going to buy some milk (I’m not sure why) and some bread from the shop. I scrambled up over a dune and came past the chalet of the owners who pointed out a sandbank to me (could this have been the earlier one that I was talking about?) but anyway I scrambled on to the camp shop. Here, I was chatting with the proprietor and he told me about one or two incidents on the camp so I told him that I’d already been attacked but I had fought off my attackers with a milk bottle and described in gory detail just how I had done it.

Alison rang me up while I was eating my butties. She was finishing work early and so she would be home by 15:00. so at 15:05 I was outside her house, with her waiting for me at the gate. She introduced me to Brian and we all had a cup of coffee.

Alison and I worked together at that weird American company – The Conference Board. That was a strange place to be – a ruthless American company operating a ruthless American employment regime and being upset by the constraints imposed upon it by European employment law. Not only that, it was living about 30 years behind the times in its commercial approach and was resisting all efforts to drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. There were only 4 of us who were anything like normal, and we had all gone within 12 months. And if I’m classing myself as “normal”, you must really all be wondering about the others.

We had such a chat and so much to talk about that I didn’t realise that it was well after 23:00 when I staggered up into the attic. She has a lovely house – an old 2 bedroom end-of-terrace house with about 5 different extensions so it’s like a labyrinth inside and it’s wonderful.

So now I’m tryng to get myself ready for my hospital appointment tomorrow. This is the crucial moment in my life so I need to be on my best form.

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

Wednesday 14th October 2015 – SO HERE I AM THEN …

… in the coach station at Montreal, having alighted from my bus.

We reached Riviere du Loup in the small hours and had just a half-hour wait until the bus from the Gaspé arrived. But waiting isn’t so bad. It’s in the back room of a big Irvings petrol station and so it’s warm, there are seats, there are toilets and there are food and coffee available for anyone who feels the need. It’s not unpleasant at all.

The bus was quite full but the seats are quite comfortable so it wasn’t too much of an issue, and I missed most of the journey because I’d dozed off before we’d even left the premises.

I was awake though for when we stopped at Ste-Foy on the outskirts of Quebec, and I woke up again for when we stopped at Longueuil. And wide-awake for when we pulled into the coach station. 20 minutes late, it has to be said, but that’s more to do with the amount of traffic on the road at that time of morning.

The 747 bus for the airport leaves from right down at the far end of the coach station and opposite the booking desks there’s an STM (Société des Transports de Montreal or whatever) where you buy your bus tickets. As the airport is outside the limits of the Montreal urban area, you need to buy a $10:00 day ticket (or an $18:00 3-day ticket) to travel on the bus to the airport.

No point in going to the airport yet though, because I’m hours too early. But round the corner from the bus stand is a café that does a very democratic breakfast and coffee, with free wi-fi and power connections available, and so I dug myself in there for a while.

The bus ride was totally painless. 30 minutes is the advertised time but I had no idea of how long it took because I had a comfortable seat and I was reading a book. It seemed like just a couple of minutes and I was taken by surprise when we arrived.

Upstairs to the baggage check-in and I deposited my baggage. And wimp that I am, my luggage weighed just 20.3 kg, hand luggage included. That’s astonishing because I’m always usually pushing it to the max when I come back.

Downstairs again now. First call was to the Immigration Service to enquire about the procedure for obtaining this mythical form IMM 1442 next time that I come back. Apparently, when I present myself to the immigration desk, I mustn’t let him stamp my passport. I have to be sent to the offices behind the check-in desk and ask there for the form. I’ll probably be interviewed and I have to explain things to them and I should be given the form that I need. The girl that I spoke to didn’t see it as being anything more complicated than that.

Second port of call was to the Subway. There’s one of them in the airport and it’s the cheapest, quickest place to buy lunch. And I’ve learnt now that, in order to avoid any confusion, I order a végétarien sans fromage and that is simply that. No confusion at all.

It’s a very good job I came back early from my lunch because you can see more of the pantomime that is now taking place at the airport.

You’ll recall the 2.5-hour wait that we had to enter the country, and now we have a 40-minute wait to pass the “security” gates. On interviewing one of the people who was “controlling” the queue, we asked what would happen if the delay here meant that you were late for your flight. She just shrugged her shoulders.

Strangely enough, there was only an American woman and me who thought that this was objectionable. The other 800 or so people in the queue simply accepted it. I can’t believe just how docile and cowed the Westerners have become over these last 10 or 12 years since the Government started grinding their faces in the dirt. 800 people in uproar over this would change things in minutes but Western people these days have lost their sense of fighting spirit.

I spent most of my time in the queue chatting to a pleasant girl from Manitoba, and then we hit the “security” gates.

Pig-ignorant security guards barking out commands without a single “please” and that annoyed me intensely. I had another stand-off with another one of these very sad people and in the end I got her to say “please” when she asked me to take off my boots. I can’t believe that in modern-day Montreal it’s necessary to go to war to obtain a bit of basic and elementary human decency and politeness.

The plane was late, as you might expect, but it was well-worth waiting for. An almost-new, magnificent Airbus A340-300. Packed out to the gunwhales it was too, with just two free seats – one of which was next to me and so I was able to spread myself out.

The food, as you might expect with Lufthansa, was excellent indeed and the cabin staff was very helpful. Not much on the entertainment system, though, but I was able to see a couple of old Bundeslegia matches – Borussia Dortmund v Schalke 04 and then Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund, and then I dozed off while watching the new Asterix the Gaul film.

-2

Tuesday 13th October 2015 – NOW HERE’S A THING

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the question of fuel consumption for Strider has been causing me some little concern. Darren and I have talked at length about this, and one of the options that came up in the conversation involved fitting a diesel engine in him.

This is not as strange an idea as it might sound, and for three reasons too.
Firstly, the Ford Ranger is made under licence in Japan as the Mazda B3000 and that comes with a factory-fitted option of 3.0-litre diesel engine.
Secondly, in Europe it’s available with the same diesel engine as is in Caliburn
Thirdly, the engine is based on the old Ford V6 Cologne engine that was fitted in the late Taunuses and early Granadas, Sierras and Transits, and I actually have two diesel engines on my farm – a 2.5 NA and a 2.3 Sierra diesel – that would bolt straight in on the bellhousing.
I would lose a great deal of power of course with a diesel engine but why on earth does a Ranger need 207 hp? 163 hp is plenty.

Not only that, if you’ve been following my adventures around North America, you’ll remember that about 5 weeks ago, I met a guy in Bridgewater, Maine, who has a diesel fetish and has fitted diesel engines into almost everything that he owns, including a motor bike.

And so this morning after breakfast and after spending some time at the tyre place saying goodbye to everyone, I went over across into Maine to see him.

As you might expect, he wasn’t there. But his ladyfriend was and we had a good chat for a couple of hours about this and that.

Back in Canada, I went down to Woodstock and by the time we got … "you said that yesterday#34; – ed … I went to pick up another tote box. Leaving everything in Strider and leaving Strider in an open hangar means that we might attract all kinds of things and so I need to have everything in boxes and properly closed. Walmart had some tote boxes like the one that I bought last year, for just $6:00 and they also had, for $6:00, a three-drawer set of plastic drawers. I’ve been looking for one of those for a while, to put the cutlery and stuff like that in. I wasn’t going to pass that up.

I went to Tim Horton’s to catch up with the internet, and then round to the car wash to give Strider a really good going-over and to vacuum him out. I’d also bought a pile of mothballs and some sheets of Bounce. Folklore in New Brunswick is such that if you scatter them about liberally, they keep away mice, skunks and all of that kind of thing. Consequently, Strider is stuffed full of them.

After supper, we took the battery off Strider and put him away in the hangar for the winter. And it was at this moment that the diesel guy from Maine called me up to say that he needed to see the gearbox bell housing before he could do anything. And so that will have to wait until next year, won’t it?

Rachel ran me up to Florenceville and we had a big goodbye when the bus pulled in at the Irving garage to take me off to Montreal. It’s hard to believe that my 8 weeks in Canada is up already. I feel like I have been here for ever and quite frankly, I wish that I had been and that I could.

The bus journey to Montreal is quite painless. The buses are big, clean and roomy and then there aren’t too many people on them. I had two seats to myself and so I could spread out and make myself comfortable as we shot off to Riviere du Loup where we change for the bus that comes up from the Gaspé.

Saturday 10th October 2015 – MY QUIET WEEKEND CONTINUES

I had a nice relaxing night last night in my motel room doing not very much at all. At least I had a really good sleep and a nice warm shower this morning.

And by the time that I was ready to leave, the rain was on the verge of stopping but we were having a really high wind and that was depressing.

First stop that I made after driving through the Appalachain mountains was at the small town of Matapedia.

Apart from the town itself and its position on the junction off across the river and into New Brunswick, the interesting thing about the town itself is the railway station. The railway line that runs from Halifax to Montreal along the coast passes through here and, much to everyone’s surprise, there’s a passenger service

But as you can see, the passenger service, run by VIARAIL, runs just once per day (and then not on Tuesdays).

And the station looks like it too. The building is almost derelict, the woodwork is rotting away, it’s overgrown with dust and weeds, and the rails are rusted. It’s really in quite a deplorable state but at least it’s here. Any complaints and a demand for an overhaul, and VIARAIL will probably just pull the service.

And it seems that I’m not the only one to be concerned by the lack of attention that VIARAIL is paying to the Atlantic provinces, and that’s good news.

There’s an organisation called Transport Action Atlantic which seems to be involved in revitalising rail transport in New Brunswick and this organisation seems to be doing something here at Matapedia as you can see here.

It’s not that the aims of this group are utopic – far from it – it’s just that the organisations with which it is dealing is so intransigent that any form of negotiated agreement is impossible. But nevertheless, I wish them luck.

I found a road that led down to the head of the Baie des Chaleurs too, so that I could take a photo of it.

There’s a good view of the Sugar Loaf mountain over there to the right, and the huge pulp mill at Atholville in front of it.

I stopped at Campbelltown to use the internet at Tim Horton’s and then to do some shopping at Sobey’s. And then I was off into the mountains to the western side of New Brunswick

And what do you think about this then?

I can’t remember when was the last time that I saw one of these in the UK, never mind North America. It’s a Hillman Minx, badge-engineered as a “Sunbeam” and dates from the late 50s or very early 1960s and it’s as rare as hens teeth.

But I’ve been saying quite a lot that in the space of 20 years Britain went from selling its cars all over the world to not even being able to sell its own cars in its own country. It’s probably the most dramatic collapse of industry in the whole of the history of the world and has contributed to the decline of the UK from a major world power to an insignificant offshore island.

Seeing vehicles like this in isolated corners of the world just goes to underline it.

I ended up in Perth Andover at a little motel. I always spend my last night on the road in a motel so I can clean and tidy everything. This one is nicely-situated just off the highway near a pizza place (so I can use up my vegan cheese) and I can wash all of my pots, pans and crockery in perfect peace.

-2

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: quebec

Saturday 1st OCTOBER 2016 – I HAD NOTHING …

Friday 30th September 2016 – THEY CALL ME TRINITY

Thursday 29th September 2016 – DO YOU KNOW WHAT?

Wednesday 28th September 2016 – WELL, WHAT CAN I SAY?

Tuesday 27th September 2016 – NO PRIZES …

Monday 26th September 2016 – I MUST HAVE BEEN …

Wednesday 7th September 2016 – WHAT A GOOD DECISION …

Tuesday 6th September 2016 – “WELL ON THE WAY …

Saturday 11th June 2016 – YESTERDAY AFTERNOON …

Thursday 24th March 2016 – BACK IN THE NETHERLANDS

Monday 21st March 2016 – SO OFF I SET …

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

Wednesday 14th October 2015 – SO HERE I AM THEN …

Tuesday 13th October 2015 – NOW HERE’S A THING

Saturday 10th October 2015 – MY QUIET WEEKEND CONTINUES

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