I went for a walk around the campsite and was treated to this sight here. Someone is having a boat recovered from the marina here on the Richelieu River, and the campsite here has this huge Volvo tractor and trailer unit to perform tasks like this.

Something of a monster, I don’t suppose that recovering the Queen Mary would have been beyond its power. Still, watching it with this boat was a good way to start off the morning.

From here, I set off down the road to the locks at St Ours. The Richelieu Valley (heading north) connects up with the Hudson valley (heading south) forming something of an easy route between Montreal and New York. We came up the Hudson last year, you may remember, and you’ll recall that it was the scene of several bloody encounters between the British, the French, the Americans and the natives in the 17th and early 18th Centuries.

Once peace (of a sort) had finally descended on the valley it was decided to construct a canal to facilitate water transport around several of the rapids along the way.

These are the locks on the river at the town of St Ours. The original lock is the one that has been filled in, on the left of the photo. The new one, built in the 1930s is larger and was built to correspond with the size of the locks down in the Hudson Valley.

This car is a 1958 Chevrolet Delray, and it’s for sale if you are interested. A mere $9,000 (or near offer) and it’s yours, but only if you are prepared for a lot of work because, leaving aside the question of the accident damage for the moment, it isn’t in very good condition.

$9,000 will be only the start of your expenditure to put this car back on the road, which is a shame.

Mind you, I’ve seen cars up for sale in much worse condition than this, although not at this kind of price.

Next town along the road is that of St Denis Sur Richelieu. This was the home of Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of the 1837 rebellion against – not the Anglais as all of the signs round here insist – but the Britanniques (and it says something for the Quebecois extremists and their attitudes that they can’t even get that correct).

Everywhere you go, there are plaques saying things like “Papineau bought a loaf of bread from a boulangerie situated on this spot” and “this is the spot where Papineau scrathed his nose”.

This is not one of those – this is the spot where in November 1837 a group of “patriots” repelled an attack by 500 regular (British, not English) troops.

What the plaque doesn’t tell you is that 10 days later the regular troops returned to St Denis and burned down the town, there being no opposition as the “patriots” had all run away and hidden across the border in the USA, just down the road from here.

There is however another little plaque hidden away somewhere that does mention in small letters that the American forces on Independence visited the town in 1776 and shot some innocent civilian bystanders in cold blood, so any idea that that the Quebecois have nothing but a total and utter depraved and warped fixation about the nasty and horrible Anglais (and not Britannique) is totally false.

Now this is an interesting find, isn’t it?

It’s a pot of ice cream but made, not with cows’ milk but with almond milk. The packaging proudly proclaims that it’s a non-dairy dessert and this is confirmed by the list of ingredients, and it came from a mainstream supermarket, the IGA, too.

Europe, and especially France, is a hundred years behind the times when it comes to items like this. Being a vegan, an addition of something like this to my regular diet would have me in paradise.

And it was gorgeous too.

Chambly is the next town down the line and at the head of the little lake here is a stone fort of the 18th Century – the fourth fort to be built on the site.

It’s purpose is to control the access to the rapids here on the River Richelieu, a portage where people would have to get out of their canoes and carry them overland to a smoother section of water.

The tourist season at the fort seems to last for another few weeks yet and so I was quite optimistic about visiting it, but I arrived on a Tuesday and you don’t need me to tell you what day it is that the fort has its Day of Rest.

In the 19th Century the portage became a thing of the past when, as part of the navigational improvements, the Chambly Canal was built to by-pass the rapids and ease navigation between Montreal and New York.

These are the locks that lift the boats up to the level of the ground behind the rapids, and the canal carries the traffic along to rejoin the river further back.

So now I’m off to find a campsite for the evening. It’s threatening rain and it’s not very optimistic.