Tag Archives: canadian pacific

Sunday 2nd October 2022 – AS I TYPE …

… these notes I’m sitting in a train that’s rocketing eastwards along the south bank of the St Lawrence River.

For reasons that only they will know and, if the rest of us were to know them, we still wouldn’t understand them, CoachAtlantic has taken off the service that runs between Moncton and Rivière du Loup.

Back in the old days, I would catch the “Orleans Express” bus from Montreal to Gaspé, alight at Rivière du Loup and await 90 minutes for a bus to come in from Moncton and turn round. But that’s no longer possible.

What I’m having to do now is to catch a train that goes to Halifax, alight at Moncton and wait three hours for a bus to take me back north-west. It’s like travelling 270° of a circle and what started off as a journey of about 9 or 10 hours has now become a journey of 26 hours.

Any British person who is complaining about the effects of Dr Beeching on the British railway network would have apoplexy if ever he were to examine the Canadian railway network. There is only one passenger train east of Québec in the whole country and I’m on it. There is absolutely nothing else. And although I paid for four nights in my hotel I only ended up staying for three because this train only runs a couple of days per week.

And that’s the Canadian National Railway. The whole of the Canadian Pacific network east of Québec, freight as well as passengers, has been ruthlessly hacked off, every inch of it. There’s a railway station right at the back of Rachel and Darren’s mill but that hasn’t seen a train since 1982.

And that’s why you’ll see a lot of “misinformation” about “The First Transcontinental Train” going from Montreal to Vancouver. In its embarrassment, Canadian Pacific is trying its best to shove under the carpet the fact that it had at one time a huge network in the Maritime Provinces.

And if anyone is wondering why I’m not flying, I’m refusing flat-out to pay … gulp … $1335 for me and my baggage.

If you don’t have a car in Canada, you are really in some extreme kind of difficulty and for that reason I’m seriously thinking of selling Strider and going back to hiring a vehicle at the airport. I can’t do this kind of journey again under any circumstances.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, I was wide-awake, and in total agony by the way, at 06:30 and I went off to have my medication.

And having dealt with that I could get on with what I had to do. And while I was doing it, I was sitting with my right foot in a bucket of ice-cold water. I have to do something to try to improve my foot.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night. I was going away with a girl but first of all I had to go back to the office to pick up my car, the beige MkIV that we had. When I arrived there, parked outside was the chocolate brown one with Nerina sitting in it. I had to basically chivvy her up out of the car so that I could get in and take it away with me as I had a ferry arranged for later that night. She said that I couldn’t go yet as there was a problem with a couple of the cars. The beige one had just quite suddenly cut out. She did say what was up with the second. The way that she described it, it was simply a wire off the beige one that I could fix in a matter of seconds. Then she said that one of the drivers had all the wages. I asked “which driver?” so she gave me a name but I didn’t recognise that driver. I asked about the rest and she said that it was in our lock-up. I thought that I’d better go and collect that. She said “you’ll need to go quickly before they go and fetch it”. I set off but I had to go back and ask where the lock-up was. She told me then I had to go back to ask which lock-up it was. I could see this lasting for hours, not finding the money, not fixing the car, not going away.

Later on, Mrs Ukraine was asking me why I was so interested in the fate of refugees in France. I explained briefly to her the story of my mother as a child being evacuated with 10 minutes notice to go to live with strangers. I told her all that story. Then I was on patrol with the Ukrainian Army but in France. They had found the coast and were making more of it. A helicopter then flew in. The first thing that it did was to winch out my brother. I imagined that I’d be next but it looked as if someone else was preparing to go, a woman. In the meantime my brother and two people were standing on a cloud playing football. As other people started to be winched in one of the guys came up to me to say that he needed a cannon. They had to make certain what it was that he actually wanted. It turned out to be a self-propelled armoured vehicle with something bigger than an 0.762mm machine gun. I said that I’d try to see what I could find for them and started thinking in my head about people I knew who might actually have that kind of equipment and I’d go along and negotiate it out of them.

As for the story about my mother, regular readers of this rubbish in a previous version will recall having seen a photo of where my mother lived as a child. It’s a small terraced house at the side of the road in Birchington in Kent, about 200 yards away from the end of the runway of Manston Airfield which was a major RAF base. At the fall of France and the first stick of Luftwaffe bombs dropping on the airfield, all of the children in the vicinity, my mother and her younger sister included, were rounded up with 10 minutes notice, put on a train and evacuated. My mother and my aunt ended up living in Somerset with people whom they didn’t know and had never met, with just one small suitcase each. Listening to my mother’s stories, what happened to them must have been an appalling nightmare for little kids like them and as a result I have a great deal of empathy for anyone else fleeing from their homes under a stick of bombs, no matter who they are and where they are.

Another thing that I did was to have a shower and to clean myself up ready to leave, and then to tidy up my room. And in many senses I’m sorry to leave this place. It’s much smaller than the place where I stay in Leuven but it’s much more modern and better-equipped. Had I been more mobile this place would have been pretty high up on my list of places to stay but the stairs killed me off.

My foot had gone down somewhat and it was easier to walk about. Putting on my elastic stocking made it go down a little more and although it was still difficult to put on my shoe, I was able to move around a little better than I did yesterday and that was a relief.

On my way to the station I stopped for a quick snack before getting on the Metro. It’s as well to have some food before leaving because I’m not sure what the arrangements for food will be on the train. There is a restaurant car on board but whether there will be anything that I can eat, or whether I can actually afford it anyway if there is, are interesting questions.

At the station I had to check in my suitcase witn STRAWBERRY MOOSE on board and then wait for boarding. I declared myself as in need of assistance so someone accompanied me down the escalator – It’s a long, steep drop to the bottom if I fall.

We’ve SEEN VIARAIL TRAINS BEFORE when we were in Halifax and they seemed to be are absolutely ancient and in poor state of repair.

These days, nothing much seems to have changed. And that’s not all. The interiors are like something out of the 1960s, all leather and chrome, but it looks to be supremely comfortable.

Having had assistance to board, I was one of the first to find a seat. The train ended up to be crowded although I was one of the lucky few who didn’t have a neighbour. Mind you, someone is sitting right behind me with a couple of toddlers by which time it was too late to change seats. It’s going to be a long, noisy night.

After what seemed like for ever, our train pulled out slowly from the railway station and we eventually found ourselves out in the open air.

It was going dark quite quickly and as the train looped round to the south to cross over the St Lawrence there was a really nice view of the city with all of the buildings illuminated.

We aren’t exactly in a hurry. It’s not what you call high-speed travel. In Europe this kind of pace would be embarrassing. It’s going to be a very long journey, I reckon, but at least I was right about the seats. They are comfortable and I have two to myself so I can spread out.

Something else that I can tell you about Viarail and the Canadian National railway network, such as it is, is that passenger trains have a very low priority. By the time we’d gone an hour out of Montreal, already we’d ground to a halt twice to give precedence to freight trains.

Having now had a coffee, I’m going to settle down while it’s quiet. I’ll probably be awoken a dozen times during the night so I need to take advantage of whatever quiet I can find.

Thursday 17th August 2017 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, all of this has changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole system is like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we had a miracle in Montreal too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’ve even brought their chairs with them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No sleep for me!

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 3rd October 2015 – START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON.

I decided this morning that I would have a proper breakfast (of sorts) and so I called into the local Tim Hortons for coffee and bagels. And then promptly dropped the whole lot on the floor, followed by the laptop.

Still, at least it amused the patrons of the establishment.

I was up early after my rather late night last night and did a pile of paperwork in something of a vain attempt to catch up and then hit the road for Rimouski and breakfast. At least they gave me some more bagels and coffee. And someone with whom I was chatting confirmed that the serving wench there asked me 7 times if I really didn’t want butter on them.

I’d never had a proper look at Rimouski before and so I had a little drive around. It’s a typical seaside town with beaches, plenty of motels and amusements – just the place to come for a fortnight if only the river were warmer, because the St Lawrence is a really cold river.

But I was here at Rimouski for other reasons. As Austin Powers once famously said to Basil Exposition, “what’s long, hard and full of seamen?”.

There’s a small maritime museum here at Rimouski and the pride of place goes to the old Canadian submarine Onondaga. I’ve always said that you would never ever get me into a submarine, and at the price that they wanted for a visit, nothing was ever likely to change.

There’s quite a little complex of buildings here and the old port facilities when this area was a major port for all of the coast-hopper ferries that started from here.

Much of this traffic has been replaced by road now and what is left departs from the quayside in the town and so this area is redundant. But there are quite a few maritime souvenirs left to visit and it’s a nice place to walk around and to eat your butties

But it was the new pavilion that I had come here to see – or, rather, it was the contents of the new pavilion.

On the evening of 28th May 1914 the Canadian Pacific transatlantic liner Empress of Ireland set out from Quebec on her way to Liverpool. She stopped off at Rimouski to drop off her river pilot and then set off full ahead for Liverpool.

Just a couple of kilometres out of Rimouski she sighted the collier Storstad and then each ship became enveloped in a fog bank.

What happened after that has never been adequately explained, but it’s suspected that some of the portholes were open and the collision rolled the ship so that the water poured in.

The net result was that the liner took the Storstad full-on in the beam and sank within 14 minutes, taking 1012 passengers with her. And they all lie right underneath where that white buoy lies.

It’s the greatest marine tragedy every to hit Canada and one of the largest losses of life of any marine accident in peacetime. Remember that the Titanic lost 1507 passengers, but she was 4 times as big, and this disaster took place right within sight of shore.

Quite a lot of the ship has been salvaged since her wreck was rediscovered in the early 1960s. Some of it is displayed in the museum (and this was what I came to see). Very much more of it is held in private hands, which is a shame.

But what is even more disgraceful in my opinion, even though I know for a fact that many others, including the museum staff, disagree with me, is that much of it, including one of the massive brass propeller screws, has been sold for scrap. $5,300 the salvors were paid for the propeller and that just goes to show that some people have absolutely no sense of history.

In fact the looting of the wreck became so blatant (there was talk that one team was planning to use dynamite on the hull to make an easier entry into the bowels of the ship) that the authorities “nationalised” the wreck and placed it out of bounds to salvors, although private divers can visit it.

And hence the buoy – to moor your ship and to display the “statutory notice” about looting.

The disaster took place just off the headland of St Luce and there’s a modern Celtic cross on the headland there that clearly relates to the disaster.

In the cemetery however is a concrete and stone cross dated 1920 looking out over the headland to the sea. There’s no plaque to say to what it relates but the date and its position would seem to be significant as being an early memorial to the disaster.

It’s hard to understand how it was that the notion of the earth being flat persisted as long as it did amongst the powerful classes.

While I was sweeping the horizon looking to see what I could see, I noticed a few peculiar shapes and so I photographed them with the telephoto lens at its fullest extent and enlarged the image to see what I could see.

It turns out that it’s the superstructure of a ship, way across the other side of the St Lawrence. The ship is at such a long distance away that the hull has been lost due to the curvature of the earth.

As for the town of St Luce, it’s another seaside resort but much smaller than Rimouski. It’s quite a quaint little place, another small town where I would be quite happy to pass a week or two relaxing in the peace and quiet.

But the shore of the St Lawrence is really beautiful around here with all of the beaches. It’s a shame though that it’s on the south shore and so it doesn’t catch the sun as much as the north shore. And the north shore is a good 5° colder so it’s not as pleasant for sunbathing.

I’ve had a couple of really exciting and involved chats with a couple of people today and we’ve really put the world to rights.

However, it’s made the time pass really quickly and as a result the sun is disappearing rapidly. We’re having a glorious sunset but none of this is helping me find a place to stay.

And while I’m dithering, the temperature has dropped rapidly too and it’s freezing. But I’ve found a type of chalet motel place with cooking facilities and while it’s a little more than I would be happy paying, it’s got absolutely everything and I can cook myself a really hot meal. And so I’m saving there too.

And talking to the proprietor’s wife, she’s a vegan too and gives me a huge bowl of home-made vegan vegetable soup. And that’s the most delicious thing that I’ve eaten for ages.

-2

Thursday 27th August 2015 – WHAT A STORM!

Totally terrific. Lightning, thunder and the most astonishing rain that fell in just 10 minutes. And the worst thing about that is that I had left Strider’s drivers-side window open and so at least on the way home I washed my underwear.

I had a disturbed night, with something of a record of having to leave my bed – and I blame this half-litre of thirst-quenching drink that I had had with my tea. And I also slept through the alarm clocks too and it was 08:30 when I finally rose from my stinking pit

I’ve said … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that there was an old Canadian Pacific railway line that came up to Centreville from Woodstock and I’ve been following its path in a desultory kind of fashion.

There’s a road near here called Avondale Station Road and I’ve had a wander down there on a couple of occasions looking for the station site without success.

But having tracked down the route using aerial photographs I’m pretty convinced that this is the track bed of the railway, although the station site is well-overgrown – to such en extent that it’s not clear on which side of the road it would have been.

From here I headed off to Woodstock again and ended up having to go on a marathon detour almost to the USA border due to roadworks. And I met my bus from the other night too while I was on my travels around.

I ended up at Walmart looking for clothes and some guy in a wheelchair thought that it was fun to get in my way whenever I was trying to pick something up. Eventually I managed to reach something, and he made a remark like “Why didn’t you ask me to move?”
“Because I used to be married – I’m used to people being difficult”.

But I did have another piece of good luck in Walmart. A small lightweight 1/4 – 3/8 drive socket set at $9:00. This toolkit is building up slowly.

At Tim Horrton’s we were once again surrounded by Miltonists. About 10 staff on duty, one of whom was at the drive-in, another of whom was at the counter, a third was making wraps and as for the rest, “they also serve who stand and wait”.

After my coffee I went round to see Zoe’s shop and for a chat to see how she was doing. She could be doing better of course, but it’s hard to tell a 21 year-old about your 40-odd years of sometimes-bitter experience. They would much rather make their own mistakes. And then round to Sharp’s to see if they would take the scrap metal that we have (they will).

I went back to Centreville along the road on the eastern side of the Saint John River.

It’s not a road that I travel very often and so I don’t know all of the good views, but here’s a stunning viewpoint from a few miles south of Hartland. We can see the Saint John River of course, and in the background we have the wind farm up on Mars Hill in Maine, USA (my plot of land is to the right of the hill).

In the centre of the photo is the bridge that took Trans-Canada Highway version 2 (or is it 3?) over the river, but in front of this you’ll be able to make out the world’s longest covered bridge at Hartland.

My way back to Rachel’s took me over the river and back via Lakeville where there’s a car body repair shop. He always has some interesting stuff there but as he’s one of the best body repairers in the region his output is far too good to be suitable for these pages.

But there are always exceptions to this, such as this absolutely wonderful Mack Thermodyne B61 of the early 1950s.

It’s been stood for ages but he’s managed to make it go, however the water pump has failed. He says that it’s up to the owner to source one, and he wishes him good luck. The plan, I imagine, is that once it’s running he’ll restore it, and I’ll love to see it when it’s finished.

Hannah was supposed to be ringing me up to give her a hand to mow the lawn but she never did, and so I popped by to see how she was doing. But she had done it all on her own without my help and now she and her friend Journee were making a beer-pong table for her party tomorrow night. I went on to the shop and waited for closing time.

And this was when the storm hit.

Later in the evening Darren and I loaded up Strider with a huge fridge and a big stove. On my way round to Great Satan I’ll be heaving them out at Sharp’s.

Thursday 2nd October 2014 – IT WAS FREEZING THIS MORNING.

And I’m not joking either. It might be a slight exaggeration though, for it was 2°C outside when I set out. And there was a huge hanging cloud everywhere that meant that you couldn’t see a thing.

Up on the hill at the end of the road, you can see what was going on. It seems that Centreville is suffering the wrath of the Gods today and is swathed in this huge hanging cloud while the rest of the region is bathed in glorious sunshine.

I don’t know what we have all done to deserve that, but here it is and here’s the proof.

I set out to continue my exploration of the area and managed to find my way onto the old railway bridge that I featured yesterday.

It’s evidently seen much better days than this and it’s not the strongest bridge over which I have walked in my time. But at least it’s still here and not been swept away. And it was a beautiful day in the sunshine out of the hanging cloud.

I mentioned … "a few times now" – ed … that there was a railway line that followed the Saint John River between the coast and Edmundston in the north, and it crossed the river just outside Woodstock.

I went for a prowl around in the area and found the old bridge. Much to my surprise, most of that is still here too. One span is missing but nevertheless, the main part of the bridge is still standing and that looks quite impressive even if it is in worse condition than the one at Centreville.

There are the remains of an old rural railway station near here and the goods yard has been transformed into a commercial vehicle scrap yard. I had a slow drive past to see what I could see, and attracted the attention of a couple of the employees who took a decided interest in what I was up to.

I had my lunch on the car park that is by the “lake” in the River Meduxnekeag (I hope that I’ve spelled that correctly) in the beautiful sunshine, and then read a book and had a play on the guitar for a while. I didn’t feel much like going anywhere else seeing how nice the day was and how good was my little spec here.

And why not? I’m on holiday and I should be relaxing. It’s what holidays are for.

And autumn is definitely here. No wonder they call it “fall” in North America because I’ve never seen leaves fall so quickly from the trees as I did today. And you will be surprised at the noise that they make too. I would never have believed it.

Wednesday 1st October 2014 – NOT FOR NOTHING …

… is this area known as the French Fry Capital Of The World. And not for nothing does it have the world’s largest food processing plant. It’s the potato harvesting time and you can’t move on the roads without squidging a potato that has fallen off the back of an overleaded potato lorry.

And with the weather having been dry for the last while or so there are clouds of dust all over the horizon where the potato rippers are out harvesting this years crop. All this automation is a far cry from when I used to go spud-bashing as a kid.

You never know – the McCain Frozen Chips that you eat next yar light be the very ones that you are seeing here being ripped out

After that, I’ve been hunting down old railway lines.

As we mentioned the other day, there was formerly a railway line that ran along the banks of the Saint Jonh River, and a branch left the main line at Woodstock to come up to Centreville. In fact, the tractor-pulling track in Centreville is situated on the former site of the railway goods yard.

I set out today to see if there were any vestiges of the old line still remaining, and here on the edge of town I found, not darkness, but an old bridge that very likely carried the line over the river that runs through the town.

It looks as if it’s in the correct place and going in the correct direction so it’s a fairly safe bet.

Further along the road is the town of Lakeville and on the back road that runs (eventually) to the Saint John River is where the old track bed crosses the road.

And knowing nothing at all about anything related to this railway line, this is the site that looks to me like the most logical site to have built the railway station.

As I have said before, only in the UK has everything that there is to be known about all railway lines in the country been recorded and documented. In all other countries of the world, the old abandoned railway lines have simply been forgotten.

And as I have also said before … "and you will say again" – ed … Canada ruthlessly out-Beechinged Beeching when it came to savaging the country’s rail network. There’s practically nothing left of it, and passenger transport is definitely a thing of the past.

This afternoon I spent sitting in a Ford Ranger 4×4 pickup. 2011 (so it is probably one of the very last to be made), white, one owner, main-agent maintained, 49,000 kms on the clock and looking as if it’s just come out of the factory. It was love at first sight, I’ll tell you that, but the price tag of a mere $16950 means that the love will remain unrequited.

But it was a magnificent vehicle, a credit to its previous owner, and probably worth every penny of its sale tag.

It was at the Ford main agent in Woodstock and I ended up having a long chat with the owner. They do have Rangers in fairly often but very few make it onto the forecourt. Most of them are sent straight away to the auctions at Moncton. Anyway, he now knows what I’m looking for and, more in hope that expectation, he has my phone number.

I crashed out this afternoon at the side of the road – I had another really bad night last night and was still awake at 05:00 – and then came back here for tea. Now I’m off for an early night.

And October already.

-2

Sunday 31st August 2014 – WELL I’M GLAD …

… that I had bought a cheap lightweight tripod in a brocante in France a few years ago, and brought it over to Canada. It’s certainly earning its keep.

I ended up on the top of Mount Royal last night – at the Maison Smith, where there are some of the most spectacular views of the city. And the view at night with all of the street lights is absolutely stunning as you can see.

Here’s the view right down one of the main boulevards in the city, with all of the traffic, and you can see in the distance the reflection of the lights, shimmering off the surface of the St Lawrence River.

It really is a magnificent place to be on a late-summer evening. It’s a place not to be missed, especially if you can manage a nocturnal visit.

You can tell, can’t you, that i’ve picked up my car this evening. A Red Dodge Grand Caravan, just 4weeks old and still with the distinctive smell of “new car” about it. It has just 3200 kms on the clock, the fools. You would have thought that they would have known me better by now.

This morning I braved the gloom ond overcast fog to go down to the Lachine Canal – the canal that took the ships around the Lachine rapids prior to the building of the St Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. It’s just used for pleasure traffic now but it is quite a historic place to be as much of Canada’s industry from the days of the Industrial Revolution was based here.

Bit I had an encounter with the forces of law and order. They drove their car up the pavement to stop me advancing and, on leaving the car, asked me all kinds of questions such as who I was, where had I been, what was I doing, and “show us your photos”.

I shall refrain from passing any kind of really acerbic comment, as anyone who has ever followed much of what I have written will know them already, but even Canada now has become a Police State like East Germany or the USSR. How must people like Krushchev and Honecke be laughing their heads off at the West as here, there are controls imposed that will mach anything that they ever imposed upon their citizens, after the West spent 50 years denouncing their system and doing all in their power to denounce it.

When is a Wzstern politician going to stand up and say “yes, the Soviets did have a point”.

So abandoning yet another good rant, I ended up in the city centre and went to see the statue of Paul Cholmedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve.

he was the person who founded Montreal in 1642 and while it is often claimed that he led the people through the bitter period of the first 20 years of its existence, fighting for its life against the Iroquois, the fact is that quite often he was back in France pleading for help in the form of colonists and soldiers while his colonists quite often bore the brunt of the Iroquois savagery all on their own.

At the start of one of his journeys, he told one of his colonists “if I’m not back with more aid, dismantle the colony and bring everyone home” – without explaining to her how she should accomplish this task without a ship and without soldiers to fight their way back to Quebec.

It was here that I had an interesting encounter in one of these sandwich places –
Sandwich Artist (huh?) – “what would you like on your sandwich?”
Our Hero – “nothing but vegetables”
Sandwich Artist – “do you want cheese with that?”
And you can’t make up story like that either.

Here’s something that filled me with dismay when I saw it.

I’d seen a few leaflets telling me that the Quebec gas Board was replacing gas mains in the city so I was expecting to see street repairs, but I wasn’t quite expecting to see this. Here, the gas main has been replaced but clearly they can’t find anyone in the whole of the country who is able to fit cobble stones. So here in Old Montreal we have a tarmac strip.

What on earth will the world be like in 50 years tile with all of these old crafts and professions disappearing?

Talking of things disappearing, I went to see my favourite building in the whole of Montreal. It’s the Gare Viger, the Viger railway station and another old Canadian Pacific relic.

It’s been abandoned for years and so no-one is allowed inside. probably so as not to notice the consition into which the Government (for it’s now a Government building) has allowed it to continue.

However a slightly open window is no barrier to the intrepid photographer, is it?

It seems that there’s a plan afoot (“what’s afoot?” … "about 12 inches" – ed) to do something with it, but the images on the plans that I saw bear no resemblance to how the building looks at the moment. I have sore misgivings … "well, put some ointment on them" – ed.

From here I braved the torrential downpour that we were having and went to catch the bus to the airport. Two sides of the road to guess from of course, and of course you know that Our Hero guessed wrong. But anyway, hemmed in like sardines we hurtled off like a rocket and were there in 30 minutes.

And then I picked up my car.

Saturday 30th August 2014 ! WELL, I’LL BE …!

Yes, in some surprising development, I’ve had some customer service in Montreal that could rival the best that you have ever had in Brussels. It was totally astonishing.

To set the scene, I have a Canadian mobile phone with a Canadian number, supplied by Bell Telephones as they have the best coverage in the wilderness. And, as an aside, after this experience, I’ll be calling them “Hell Telephones” for ever onwards because the customer service is the closest thing to Hell that you would ever wish to find.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … my credit card expired and so I had a new one, but I forgot to upgrade the card with Bell Telephones and so my service was disconnected.

No complaints with that – it’s my own fault although one would have thought that with 50 years of expiry dates of credit cards, companies would have caught up with this kind of thing – so off to find a Bell Telephone shop.

First place that I found was one of these stands in a shopping centre. The staff there were totally uninterested but they did give me a number to call customer service. THis was when I discovered that the battery in the ‘phone was flat.

Next stall that I found, the guy there was extremely helpful and if things had carried on like this, I wouldn’t be seething out of my back teeth. Anyway, he actually put me in touch with a human at Customer Service (we did have a 20-minute queue) who told me to buy a new SIM card, put it in my phone, and call up the connection service (she gave me the number) an I’ll be back on the air.

Simple?

Not if you are anything like me it isn’t.

With the battery in my Bell phone being flat I put the SIM card in my European open-access phone and tried to call the number but several attempts gave me the “not registered on network” error message and nothing that I can do would fix it. Consequently I found another Bell telephone place – the shop in rue St Catherine to be precise.

Some girl in there who clezrly knew even less than I did checked my European phone with her data scanner. “It’s not a Bell telephone” she said, as if she were telling me something. She took me to the door, pointed across the road to the shopping mall and told me where the Rogers and the Fido stalls were. “You need to go and ask them”.
“How will they help me activate a Bell Telephone SIM card?”
“I don’t know” she replied.

Yes, you can’t make up a story like that.

But I will tell you something for nothing – and that is that we would never have reached this particular point had Samsung, the mobile phone maker, had its act together. I have three Samsung phones all told, and they all have different batteries and they all have different charging inputs. What is this all about? A standard-sized battery and a standard charging input would have saved all of this nonsense. Swapping a battery from one phone to another is the work of seconds. This thing about different chargers and different batteries (and we are talking millimetres difference in size, not anything substantial) is total rubbish.

As for the rest of the day, I’ve been on the prowl again. I found Montreal’s biggest second-hand car sales places, to find that it closes at weekends and what’s that all about too?

I did find the old headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at the abandoned Windsor Station. Canadian Pacific was another in the long line of companies that moved away from Montreal following the francophonie policies of the Quebec Provincial Government. “Cutting your nose off to spite your face” is what springs to my mind – it accounts for much of the decline in fortunes of the Province but the attitude is that the Quebeckers would rather be a very big fish in a very small pool rather than an influential subsiduary player on a multi-national stage.

The station (said he, leaving the politics aside) is a beautiful building and was only narrowly saved from demolition when Canadian Pacific pulled out. It’s now a listed building.

This is an interesting car that I encountered on my perambulations. It’s a 1939 Packhard doing a wedding at the Christ Church Cathedral in Saint Catherine Street.

The colour of the car is white-over-rust, which you can clearly see even from this distance. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a “professional” car looking as bad as this one, with the rust bubbling up on the bottom of the doors and on the rear wings underneath the paint.

The paint job isn’t bad at all even if the masking off was poor, but there’s more to a restoration project than just three coats of paint.

I also came across the Latin quarter of Montreal in the rue St Denis. What took me completely by surprise was that all of the signs here were in French. I wasn’t expecting that in the Latin quarter. “Puer amat mensam” say I.

But it isn’t half chic and trendy here. I couldn’t do with any more than five minutes of this kind of place.

At the Tourist Information desk I found not only the information that I wanted about the Richelieu Valley but also a booklet on the route to James Bay – another one of my projects. But there was nothing about the Lower North Shore. Not a surprise, seeing as how the communities down there are English, not French-speaking.

The “Forgotten Coast” indeed.

Friday 29th August 2014 – THE FAMILY PILE …

… 300 Draper Avenue, used to be over there on that site, just to the right of the streetlight in the foreground

And how can I say that with such confidence?

The answer is that I have spent a very exciting morning in the company of a very helpful archivist from the Public Records Department in Montreal.

And now I know the reason why the address has been so hard to trace too. There has indeed been a renumbering of the houses in Montreal (which I suspected) in the late 1920s, but even this wouldn’t explain the difficulty.

But the fact that my great-grandfather was a bricklayer and the houses behind it weren’t built until shortly after World War One gives us another clue.

Speaking to a very old woman whom I encountered in the street and who had lived here all her life confirmed the rest.

The archives showed that Lot 300 in Draper Avenue (the address that I had for him was 300 Draper Avenue) was subdivided into numerous different sublots all owned by the same person, and there was no official trace of his being there. Hence, we assume that he and his family were not proprietors or licensed tenants, but casual itinerant tenants (as you might expect with bricklayers living next to construction sites) – hence the sublots being all in one name (the owner of the site)

And then the lady told me that prior to the modern building here, there was a big row of shops with a pile of apartments on top. And there we are. All we need now to confirm is that the apartments had their entrance round the side that you can see, in Draper Avenue, and there we are.

I’m not sure how I’m going to do that though.

Another one of my illusions was shattered today.

Here I am on the riverfront going to eat my butty at lunchtime and clattering along come locomotive 7229, power car 200 and then locomotive 7083 of the Canadian National Railways. First time that I’ve ever seen a train along here.

Now I’ve always believed, and I’ve proved this by measurement, that Nort American trains are about a quarter of a mile long per locomotive, but all of this lot were pulling just 15 tankers. How much of a disillusionment is that?

This evening I went for another random ramble. I took the Metro to the Jean Talon station and then walked along rue Jean Talon for miles down to the Parc Metro Station.

Down here I encountered the Marché Jean Talon, which is the major fruit and vegetable market of the city. And this is a fascinating place – I can tell you that. I had a really good browse around in here, but refrained from joining the throngs who were sifting through the rubbish bins (it was at the end of the day) salvaging the dumped fruit. All kinds and classes of people were doing it – there seems to be no social stigma at all

Having found some vegan cheese earlier in the day, I could stop for a pizza. And it as here that we almost had a disaster, for I left my dictaphone behind. My faith in human nature was restored as it was still there, even though there was someone sitting at my table, when I returned 15 minutes later to look for it.

The Parc Metro Station is situated on the site of a former Canadian Pacific railway line and the old Canadian Pacific station is still standing (which is a surprise to me, having encountered so much official vandalism in North America) so I went to look for it before I caught my train

Here it is – and isn’t it wonderful? A nice collection of columns and so on, reflecting what a magnificent pile it is. It really must have been quite something in the Roaring 20s

And floodlit too, which is even better. I’m glad to see that it’s being taken care of because, anywhere else, it would have long-since been demolished to make way for glass-and-concrete offices, the fate that befell the magnificent Broad Street Station in London.

Mind you, its survival is probably not unconnected with its modern use as a trendy high-class upmarket clothes shop. They would want something of a flagship site and this would suit them fine.

The manager kindly allowed me to photograph the interior, and you can see just what a splendid railway station it really must have been.

But all of this meant that I had a 20 minute wait for the bus at DuCollege Metro Sation. I’d hit the driver’s break-time yet again hadn’t I?

Still, it was a very pleasant, warm evening so it wasn’t a real hardship, especially with some good music to listen to. I’m glad that I had found my *.mp3 player.

And I found an even better bus stop at which to alight too – it’s much nearer the passage under the motorway.

Finally – I’ve bought another toy. Well – I haven’t, I’ve reserved it and I’ll pick it up on Monday as I need a car to pick it up. More of this anon.

Friday 4th October 2013 – HERE AS PROMISED …

… is a photo of the view from my “bedroom” window from last night. It is of course the new Champlain Bridge across the lake of that name between New York and Vermont, and it’s pretty spectacular too, especially when I remember that I have a tripod in the Dodge and so I can use a long exposure.

I can’t think of many better sights to see as I settle down for the night, apart from the lighthouse from the beginning of May 2012, but that of course was something special.

Last night though, there was no-one on duty at the camp site, which was not unexpected, and neither was the note “if there’s no-one on duty when you arrive, find a vacant space and check in at 08:00”. What was however unexpected was that when I got fed up of waiting and hit the road, it was 09:44 and there was still no-one about.

I also had an encounter with yet another dissident today. The USA seems to be crawling with them but, as I have said before, they only seem comfortable expressing their dissent with foreigners such as Yours Truly. It really is just like the old Soviet Union back in the USA just now. I was not joking.

I don’t travel far, though. Just to Port Henry where I encounter what is rather laughingly called a “preserved locomotive”. Port Henry was formerly a steel town, due to the fact that there was an iron ore mine in the interior, and between the port and the mine ran a railway line, the Lake Champlain and Moriah Railroad. It all closed down in the 70s but some of the rolling stock has been “preserved” and a redundant ALCO RS18 was donatrd by the Canadian Pacific.

Why I’m treating the “restoration” with total derision is because it consisted simply if walloping a few buckets of thick black paint all over everywhere just like the “Big Boy” in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the result is just the same. Red streaks of rust everywhere where the paint has been worn away, and the rust trailing down all over the rest of the equipment giving it all an air of total dereliction, which is exactly what it is.

Here’s no surprise. Yours truly is on a ferry. It’s always a bad idea for me to go near a ferry, because every time I see one it makes me cross. This is one of the ones across Lake Champlain between New York State and Vermont that was not done away with when the Champlain Bridge was opened and you may well be surprised to learn that after more than 5 weeks on the North American continent, this is the first ferry that I have taken.

Not like me at all, you might think, but then I have had many preoccupations this year and have not been my own master as far as things like that go.

The Vermont side of Lake Champlain brought me over a series of bridges back into New York and a small one-horse town called Rouse’s Point.

Students of Civil War might well be forgiven that Rouse’s Point was the largest town in the whole of the Union States, given the number of enlistments from there in the latter stages of the Civil War. The statistics are certainly impressive. However, that is only a small part of a very long story. Rouse’s Point is the town closest to the Canadian Border for Quebeckers, and in the latter stages of the war, the Union paid quite a substantial bounty to civilians who joined up to bolster the army for Grant’s Overland Campaign in Virginia in 1864 and 1865.

Thousands joined up from Rouse’s Point but probably not even one-tenth were actually from the town. All of the rest were Canadians from Québec who discreetly crossed the border into the town, signed up, did their training, received their bounty, and then promptly deserted. And there is considerable evidence to suggest that the same person enlisted in three or even more
regiments in order to receive three or more bounties. The enrolment books of many a New York, Vermont and Maine regiment have an entry “Rouse’s Point Bounty Jumper” against a name.

From Rouse’s Point it’s a mere cockstride back into Canada and along the Richelieu Valley to Sorel on the St Lawrence. And here the second ferry of the day (and second of the holiday) takes me across the river to the north bank and the town of St Ignace.

Onto the Highway at the back of the town and off to the Service Area near Lavaltrie. I spent my first night “on the road” here, and it’s fitting that i’ll be spending my last night here, because it really is my last night in North America for 2013 and that thought fills me with total sadness.

-7

Sunday 11th September 2011 – SAINT ANDREWS

Dawn rose early over the Bayside ferry terminal, and so did I. It was rather cold in fact – a mere 8°C and that was probably what did it. But I do remember being completely comfortable last night and I didn’t feel a thing.

Anyway, I’ve made a note of this little place and added it into my little mental directory of suitable places to stay the night.

back down the road along the Saint Croix River, I can have a better view of Saint Croix Island, the Ile de Sainte Croix, than I did last night.

One thing that I could never understand however was the attitude of the British Government in giving so much away to the USA after the end of the War of Independence. Even though the Ile de Sainte-Croix was the site of the first-ever French colony on the coast of North America and thus by all accounts and rightful claims a French (and subsequently British by right of conquest) possession, the British allowed the USA to occupy it due to the fact that it was south of the main water course.

From here I went to Tim Horton’s for a coffee – and I wish that I hadn’t. 6 members of staff on duty, but only one serving and she was a trainee. And the guy in the queue in front of me orders, would you believe, 16 breakfasts. I was there for hours.

It’s the 11th of September today so Strawberry Moose gives the Americans a timely reminder, and also something else to think about.

A 21-gun salute across the Saint Croix River into USA territory at Eastport in Maine is just the thing for this morning and as usual, His Nibs is always keen to oblige whenever the need arises.

I’m at the blockhouse that’s situated on the bank of the Saint Croix River just outside St Andrews. This was one of the ones that was built in response to American aggression on the border here during the War of 1812 but by the time it was finished, the panic was over.

Just like everywhere else in Canada, it was badly damaged by fire in 1993 but was subsequently

There’s a long pier that goes out from the quayside here, and from there, there’s a very good view back towards the town.

The town dates from 1783 and was another United Empire Loyalist settlement created after the end of the War of Independence. In fact, it’s often said that some of the settlers brought their houses with them, floating them across the river on rafts.

This was where I was last night in the dark.

The town is laid out in the typical North American grid pattern that you will find in almost every city. And since then, it’s been a ferry port connected to Grand Manan island, a centre for irish immigration and, latterly, according to some tourist stuff that I had read, “Canada’s first seaside resort community”.

Talking of tourists, while I was wandering around, a tour bus from the USA pulled up and disgorged a load of passengers.

half an hour later, this boat sailed past me with a full load of passengers, presumably from the aforementioned, on their way to do a bit of whale-watching.

And I don’t know why the leader of the party needed a microphone to speak to his passengers – I could hear him quite clearly from over here.

Another thing that I do when I’m in a strange town is to look at the house prices. And I reckon that I might just be able to afford this kiddies’ garden play house.

Cheapest property in the Estate Agent’s window is a mere $63,900 and that’s just a small cabin, so residents of St Andrews can now breathe more easily. I will not be coming to join them. I can do better than that for a quarter of the price up on Mars Hill.

There’s a lighthouse here too at St Andrews. It’s the Pendlebury Lighthouse, right at the entrance to the Saint Croix River and dates from 1833.

It was disaffected in 1938 and gradually deteriorated. Some time in the early 1960s the sea wall was washed away and the lighthouse tilted over. It was eventually righted and in 2002 was moved 50 feet inland to protect it, as another section of the sea wall was observed to be on the point of collapse.

And that was just as well because in the following winter, the sea wall and the site of the lighthouse were washed away. Since then, there’s been a thorough restoration of the lighthouse and the sea wall and it’s been restored to its original location.

My route took me round by Passamaquoddy Bay and down a road that was signed as a “dead end”. The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav told me to do a U-turn in 500 metres, but she was clearly joking – or so I thought at the time.

It turns out that the island over there is called Minister’s Island and its claim to fame is that Covenhoven, the summer home of William van Horne.

And who might William van Horne be? Well, he was the power behind the Canadian Pacific Railway and this was where he came to relax.

And why is The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav not pulling my leg about this U-turn? That’s because you will have noticed the ramp over there on the island. It’s not a ramp as such, it’s part of a road because there’s a road that runs over there that is accessible at low tide. It’s only at high tide that the island is cut off.

A few times today, an old car that I thought might be a Ford A drove past me while I was wandering around. A short while later, I happened to stumble across it and I reckon that I may well be right.

It was sitting here in the drive of a house just outside St Andrews and it was not alone. It had several other old vehicles to keep it company, one or two of which will be quite exciting when they are finished.

There were a lot of roadworks going on here so I went for a closer look to see what was happening.

It’s the Digdeguash River that flows by here and it’s crossed by a bridge that has the date 1938 carved upon it. Although it crosses the river no more as it has collapsed. And it looks as if it’s been collapsed for quite a while too. hence all of the roadworks.

Next town down the road is St George and it has the most beautiful post office that I have ever seen.

St George is known as the “Granite Town” due to the fact that it had a granite quarry that for over 60 years gave up some of the best granite blocks ever seen in this part of Canada. What we see here in the post office, and some of the other buildings around here, are just seconds, believe it or not.

Just down the road at L’Etete is a ferry that goes over to Deer Island. I don’t unfortunately have the time to do over on it, so I’ll content myself with admiring it.

But interestingly, one of the members of staff told me that there’s another ferry on the other side of Deer Island that goes over to Eastport in Maine. Now isn’t that an interesting idea for an unusual crossing into Great Satan?

Down at the end of the road at Green’s Point is another lighthouse. It’s through the channel that ships travelling to St Andrews and St George used to travel and so it was logical that a light should be installed here.

At first, there was just a steam-powered foghorn installed, and the light followed as recently as 1903. The light was automated in 1996 and the keepers cottage is now used for holiday letting.

Whilst admiring the view and the water flowing by, I fell in with a guy from Toronto who was renting the cottage. He comes here every year and when you see the view you will understand why

While we were having a right old natter, our attention was drawn to three boats circling around about a mile or two offshore, with a disturbance in the water in the centre of the circle.

I took a photo with the telephoto lens and although I couldn’t see much, a little crop and enlargement produced something quite spectacular. According to my new friend, who was looking through his field glasses, we had been watching a Minke whale.

I had to dash back to St Andrews to meet Colleen but yet again I was sidetracked. I was having a good day for old vehicles, wasn’t I? In fact I’d seen many more today than those that I’m featuring on this page.

The engine was still in this one so I could tell that it’s a 6-cylinder side-valve (flathead) engine and judging by a few bits and pieces in the cab, it’s an International. And it’s just sitting here.

On a final note, Colleen and I went out for a meal (good job that I had some vegan cheese for my pizza) and we met a few of Strawberry Moose‘s admirers.

I stopped and took a few photos of them while His Nibs went over to make their acquaintance. Colleen gave him directions to her house and we went home for a coffee.

What a nice day!

Tuesday 6th September 2011 – I WENT OFF …

… for a little drive today as I had a few things to do.

But on my way out towards Florenceville I caught a good view of Centreville in the rear mirror and so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a photograph of the town. I don’t recall taking a photograph of the town from here before so I need to put that right.

In Florenceville my lawyer was unavailable but I was able to open a bank account at the bank next door. Mind you, it took them long enough and a couple of good kicks to the computer in order to do it, but there it is.

I now have 200 dollars in a Canadian bank account, and I’ll be adding to that here and there as I go around.

I took the old road down alongside the Saint John River down to Hartland and there’s a really good spec along there to stop and take a photo of the covered bridge there.

It’s the world’s longest covered bridge at 391 metres long and, much to everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t covered when it was built. The covering was actually added about 20 years later, but not many people know that.

There used to be a railway line, maintained by the Canadian Pacific, that ran up along the Saint John River.

From what I understand, which may or may not be the case, that the CPR was looking for a way out of its obligations out here beyond Montreal and in the Spring of 1987, the weather came to the aid of the company where the spring ice-flow took half of the bridge down just outside Woodstock.

That was the best excuse that the company could wish for, and the line was abandoned immediately.

At the Planning Office in Woodstock, I was out of luck. It had been closed for Labour Day and was not due to re-open until Wednesday.

I wasn’t the only person to be taken by surprise by that. A local came in with some business to do, and he was quite upset. He had a good go at Public Servants and suggested that we change our jobs. How could I disagree?

However, it wasn’t a completely wasted journey down here. Parked up here is a Chevrolet 1300 pick-up. No idea about it really but I imagine that it’s from the 1960s. But that’s just a pure guess.

It’s had a makeover and is being used as a mobile advertising display, and that’s not a bad idea. It’s certainly attracted my attention, and probably the attention of many others too.

In the Health Food shop that has just opened, they didn’t have any vegan cheese but the girl there set me right about the whole kind of different things. There’s nothing much exciting going on around here but the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival starts on the 13th and she thinks that there might be camping in one of the forest parks about 20 mins from Fredericton. That should be useful.

She was telling me about all these places to go to in Woodstock “its near here and just by there” and she noticed the puzzled look on my face.
“How long have you been in Woodstock?” she asked
“Ohhh, about 15 minutes”, I replied.

I do know that there’s a swimming pool here and so I went for a swim – and a good wash and shower – but its surely no surprise to you to learn that it’s closed for maintenance. It closed down the day I arrived and it opens up the day after I leave.

You couldn’t make it up.

But that girl was right about the vegan cheese in the Atlantic Superstore. And while I was waiting in the queue at a shop I noticed a magazine that told me that Canada’s biggest worry is the grief “given to us by our best friends across the border”. Why is this a surprise? I’ve been saying this for years

If I do come to live in Canada, I’ll be okay for work here. I could have a job on the techie counter at Walmart’s Woodstock branch because I knew more about the products on sale than the girl on the counter. It was me who had to insert the additional memory card into someone’s Blackberry and then program it – and I’d never even seen a Blackberry before.

I bought a 8GB micro-SD card for my Samsung mobile phone and wasn’t that an excellent idea? I now have an MP3 player for far cheaper than I would ever have imagined anywhere else.

also were having a DVD sale – piles of DVDs on sale for $5 – I bought 4 – 1 box contained 25 John Wayne films, another had 20 spaghetti westerns, a third had 9 commando B-features the fourth had 8 B-movie westerns. I’m set up for the long boring nights now.

But it’s a surprise to see who is starring or otherwise appearing in some of these films. There’s Klaus Kinski, father of Natasha of course, Lee van Kleef, Robert Mitchum, Van Johnson, Michael Rennie, Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Lloyd Bridges, Chuck Connors, Cesar Romero, Jose Torres, Eddy Chandler, Walter Brennan, Jack Elam, Ricky Nelson, Slim Pickens, Burt Lancaster, John Ireland (is he father of Jill?) to mention just a dozen all of whom went on to greater things.

And that is of course before we mention John Wayne himself.

On the way back to my little plot of land I have a bizarre encounter with two young boys riding bicycles towards me on the wrong side of the road.

That wasn’t all that I encountered either.

Away in the distance was a rainbow. There had been a storm somewhere and the wind had blown the residue towards me, and the sun had caught it full-on. I hope that the photo comes out as well as it looked in reality because it really was a nice thing to see.

I’d come up the back way from Woodstock, missing out Centreville, and just before I joined the road that goes down to the USA border I came across the Presque Ile stream and a lovely girder bridge that was also worth a photo.

We have different issues about whether or not this image will come out. I can’t believe how late it was and the light was going already. I hope that this photo comes out properly too.

Saturday 23rd October 2010 – YOU WOULD THINK …

… that I would have learnt my lesson by now, but not a bit of it.

Does anyone still remember my voyage around Wyoming in 2002 and how I hardly had any sleep the first night due to having chosen, in the dark, a motel right next to a railway line?

So here I am, on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and there’s the Canadian Pacific main line between the industrial centres of central Canada and the largest port on Canada’s eastern seaboard, and it passes right underneath my window.

My excuse, back in 2002, was that it was dark, so I’m going to have to think of a pretty good excuse for this one though as it was broad daylight when I arrived here.

But then again, at the first place (a cheap B&B), no-one answered (they had clearly heard all about me). The second place was full. The third place – I took one look at it, made my excuses and left. Yes, even I have principles and scruples even when travelling on a low budget.

And so a convenient motel with kitchen unit at $69, and that will have to do. At least I can cook some food and that will save me something.

However, this is where I spent last night and I will say now that if I can ever find better value than this bed-and breakfast for just $45 per night all-in then I shall move in permanently.

Like everyone else that I have ever encountered on any of my voyages around the Maritimes (with the exception of those people in that museum – The Rooms in St John’s), the proprietors were extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable.

Furthermore, although they were Anglophones, the guy here had been a copper in Québec and so was perfectly bilingual and also had some kind of empathy with the Francophone communities around here.

They moved here about 30 years ago and in that time they reckon that not a week has gone by without someone leaving the area to move elsewhere, such has been the consequence of the collapse of the economy following the decline of the fishing industry. They recounted a long, almost endless list of local businesses that had gone – the loss of the local grocery stores being the most painful and now they have to travel miles for their food supplies.

It sounded every bit as depressing as the stories that I heard when I bought my house to the Auvergne in 1997

Now I have seen some strange place-names on my travels, that’s for sure, but the one just here is definitely the one that takes the biscuit to date.

It intrigued me, why they had singled this island out for special attention by giving it this particular name. The idea that there might be drunken islands lurching around in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast here was rather a sobering thought.

But then again, maybe not. This coast is infamous for the amount of maritime accidents, collisions and sinkings of vessels and all that kind of thing, and that might explain it.

I had another leisurely drive along the coast today and nothing remarkable stood out (well, not that I am admitting to anyway) but I did encounter a mystery.

At a wharf alongside a river in a small town there was a ship (well, I think that it was a ship) that looked like it had just been raised from Full Fathom 5 after 50 years in the deeps. A rusting old hulk would have been embarrassed to have moored alongside it

So, with the silliest question being the one that is never asked, I headed off to the library. After all, librarians know everything.
“Ohhhh – that thing” she said. “They sailed it into here about 4 years ago ….”
“4? Or 40?”
“Definitely 4 or so. And it sailed in from Newfoundland” She replied. “And when it docked the people aboard ‘scattered like rats’ and they were gone. The police searched the ship thinking that there might be drugs aboard but they found nothing at all”

“So what’s it doing moored up there?”
“No-one knows” she replied. “But it’s a private wharf and as long as the mooring is paid the owner of the wharf doesn’t care about it”
“So who’s paying the mooring fees?” – I mean, you have to ask the question.
“Now there’s a good question” she repled.
And good question as it might be, she didn’t give me any answer.

What has taken my by surprise just here is that I came this way in the winter of 2003 when I was quite ill, and I made no comment whatsoever about the railway museum at Musquodoboit. Was it not here then? I ask myself. How would I not notice a railway museum? I really must have been ill.

Another thing that has taken me by surprise here is that for once in a provincial Canadian railway museum there is actually a locomotive. I mean it’s not actually a locomotive in the same category as a Pacific 4-6-2 or a Garrett articulated 2-8-8-2, but it’s here and not being turned into a thousand baked bean tins and that’s something, I suppose.

I’m having to really think if I have seen another engine before at a wayside place like this, and I can’t say that I have. There was the steam locomotive that was a stationary exhibit on the waterfront at Windsor but that was about it I reckon – "it was as recently as Baie Comeau actually" …ed

And so here I am in Halifax. I’ve been here twice before, in 2001 and 2003 and on both occasions I was rather ill, and so this evening I’ve been out taking pics – after all the ones that I took on those occasions with cheap compact digitals just didn’t work out at all.

This photo is much better.

It was taken from up on the Angus MacDonald Bridge, the bridge that goes across the Straits between Halifax and Dartmouth. That’s Halifax down there, with the Canadian Navy’s Eastern seaboard base in the foreground.

It really was quite eerie walking around here in the dark retracing the steps that I had taken in my previous visits when I was trying to take pictures like this armed with nothing more than a cheap basic compact digital.

Here, with a top-of-the-range DSLR and an optional-extra zoom lens that cost a lot of money at last I’ve been able to make some of the pics look like something useful.

And if you want to see more of the photos that I took, your wish is my command

-2

Sunday 3rd October 2010 – SOUTHERN POINT

Pelee Point is the southernmost part of Canada, and that is right here. if you look closely at the water, you’ll see the current flowing from right to left, on the right-hand side of the photo, and the wind blowing the water from left to right on the left-hand side of the photo, because the cind just here was wicked.

And when I’d finished taking the photo, I dipped my hand into the water just as a little celebration.

That’s where I’ve been today with Katherine and her friend Adam. I’m moving off tomorrow and I did promise that today I would take Katherine to wherever she would like to go, and she has chosen well.

It’s not particularly a student-type of place so I don’t imagine that there will be any tours out from the University to a place such as this. Nevertheless, it has to be an essential item on any tourist agenda.

I was puzzled by this sign though. I know that it isn’t all that far from Halloween but I couldn’t understand the reason why anyone would want to be selling goose outfits.

There was a Round The Horne sketch that featured Julian and Sandy and a goose outfit with a trapdoor for laying a golden egg, but I’m sure that it can’t be anything to do with that.

From the south end of Pelee Point there’s a view right across the bay to what I think might be Kingsville, where I was the other day and saw that Ford Cortina Mark II.

There wasn’t anywhere to take a decent photo of the town when I passed through, so this will have to do, although it’s come out rather blurred. But never mind.

On the way back, in the driving rain, because it was, we had to stop at a level crossing to let a train go by. It’s presumably on its way to Windsor and then under the tunnel from there under the river and into the USA

I’ve never seen a Canadian Pacific locomotive before so I had to take a photo, even if the raindrops didn’t do me any favours.

Having been woken up by a flight of geese passing over my motel (it’s “that” time of the year already) I made my excuses and left, in order to have a nice quiet evening to prepare myself for the road.

This last few days hasn’t ‘arf passed quickly.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: canadian pacific

Sunday 2nd October 2022 – AS I TYPE …

Thursday 17th August 2017 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

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

Saturday 3rd October 2015 – START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON.

Thursday 27th August 2015 – WHAT A STORM!

Thursday 2nd October 2014 – IT WAS FREEZING THIS MORNING.

Wednesday 1st October 2014 – NOT FOR NOTHING …

Sunday 31st August 2014 – WELL I’M GLAD …

Saturday 30th August 2014 ! WELL, I’LL BE …!

Friday 29th August 2014 – THE FAMILY PILE …

Friday 4th October 2013 – HERE AS PROMISED …

Sunday 11th September 2011 – SAINT ANDREWS

Tuesday 6th September 2011 – I WENT OFF …

Saturday 23rd October 2010 – YOU WOULD THINK …

Sunday 3rd October 2010 – SOUTHERN POINT

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