Tag Archives: chemin du roy

Monday 2nd December 2024 – I HAVE SEEN …

… my first “H” reg car today.

France isn’t like the UK – they simply issue all of the numbers consecutively until they run out, and then move on to the next letter and so on.

It’s about time that I saw one. They seem to have been stuck on GZ numbers for quite some considerable time, but this evening on the way home, parked in the Rue des Juifs there was an HA.

Interestingly, on the radio on the way home there was a talk about what the Press sees as the current financial crisis in France, with the cost of borrowing reaching 2.88% of GDP. That intrigued me because I don’t think that this amount is any big deal. Anyway I had a look, and found that the UK’s cost of borrowing is 4.4% of GDP – over half as much again.

In the USA it’s 2.86% – about the same as in France – and no-one is panicking over there. Interestingly, the USA’s borrowing is without anything even resembling the amount of social welfare that any other country pays out.

The record, by the way, according to the International Monetary Fund; is held by Ghana with 7.49%. In the Western World, it’s held by Iceland with 5.88%.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I was late again going to bed but I didn’t care at all. And once in bed, although it took an age to go to sleep, I slept the Sleep of the Dead once more, all the way round to … errr … 06:20.

Whatever awoke me I really have no idea, but once awake I couldn’t go back to sleep. So I thought but I definitely had my head in the clouds at 07:00 when the alarm went off.

It took a while for me to gather my wits, which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days, and when the room stopped spinning round I alighted and headed to the bathroom.

After a good wash I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone but to my disappointment there was nothing on there. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I have these days is what goes on during the night.

The nurse came early yet again, which cheered me up because the quicker he comes, the quicker he goes. He’s on duty on Christmas Day, apparently, so I told him not to bother coming here that day. I’m going to have a lie-in.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to tell Isabelle the Nurse not to come on New Years Day either.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading ISAAC WELD’S BOOK, which I have now finished – at least, part I of it.

He’s absolutely sold on Canada by the way. He lists several really good reasons why one should leave the UK and go West. And while the USA is the preferred destination for so many at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and for so many good reasons too, he goes to great lengths to explain why each of these good reasons is even better in Canada.

He concludes with "From a due confideration of every one of the before mentioned circumflances, it appears evident to me, that there is no part of America fo fuitable to an Englifh or Irifh fettler as the vicinity of Montreal or Quebec in Canada,"

Tomorrow I’m going to start on part II as he travels back to Montréal on the CHEMIN DU ROY but in the opposite direction to that in which I travelled when I wrote my magnum opus.

After breakfast I came in here to finish off my Welsh homework. I had to write an essay on my favourite screen character so I chose James Bond.

If I were to ask people to name the first two Bonds they would inevitably say Sean Connery and Roger Moore. In fact Moore was the fourth. Second was David Niven in the first version of “CASINO ROYALE and third was George Lazenby in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE.

Having finished my homework I started to prepare the next radio programme but was interrupted by the arrival of my faithful cleaner, come to fit my anaesthetic patches.

This new series of restrictions on the use of taxis is biting hard. We were three passengers in the taxi down to Avranches today. The other two came from somewhere miles out in the back country going home from a stay at the Centre Normandy and the car was driven by a driver who had no idea where anything at all was in Granville.

We were a crowded clinic today. Every bed was taken and once more I was last to be plugged in. The first pin went in my arm totally painlessly and I didn’t feel a thing. The second hurt like Hades and then they found that it wouldn’t work, so they had to fit a branching pipe to the first. They needn’t have fitted the second at all.

I spent the time studying my Welsh and downloading more literature that I’d been able to find. It turns out that Isaac Weld had a nephew, Charles Weld, who wrote extensively on the Arctic so I downloaded as much of it as I could find.

He also followed his uncle’s steps around Canada and the USA 50 years later and also wrote a book about his adventures. That too is a must-have as far as I’m concerned and it took a while to find a copy that I could download.

As I mentioned the other day, I can now access my LeClerc account from the Dialysis Clinic so I was busy reviewing the site and adding products onto my shopping list. Can you believe that my next LeClerc order will be the last one before Christmas? Hasn’t this year passed quickly?

While I’m at it, I’ll have to work out what other on-line shopping accounts I can access. The hospital’s firewall is quite restricting and using my ‘phone to access the internet isn’t always possible if I’m in the hospital too deep to access a wi-fi signal.

As well as all of that, I was being force-fed orange juice as my glucose level was so low.

My favourite taxi driver brought me home. She was strangely quiet which was a shame because I quite enjoy her running commentaries, especially when she’s annoyed.

Once more, I strode out and climbed the stairs boldly. I’m a long, long way from being able to climb even one of them without dragging myself up by the handrail on the wall, but at least It’s quite a change from how it used to be.

Back in here I had a little rest and then I made tea – a stuffed pepper with pasta. It was quite delicious too. It was followed by chocolate cake and lemon soya dessert.

That’s the last of the lemon soya, and tomorrow will see the last of the chocolate cake that has done me so well over the last couple of weeks. The ginger cake is cut into slices and is in the fridge ready for the next set of desserts

So now I’m off to bed ready for my Welsh class tomorrow.

Talking of James Bond, I once met Sir Roger Moore and I had a chat to him about the character that he played
"That’s right" he said. "They called me ‘Basildon Bond’"
"Why was that?" I asked, rather naively
"Well," he replied. "Since I’ve been knighted by the Queen I have letters after my name."

Friday 22nd November 2024 – AND THERE I WAS …

… dashing to make tea, wolfing it all down at a speed that’s more likely to give me indigestion than anything else, and then abandoning the washing up and dashing in here to watch the football tonight – Y Drenewydd v Connah’s Quay, only to find that the 86mm of rain that has fallen in mid-Wales in the last 24 hours has washed out the game

So after trying in vain to find another live match that was still being played, I went back to do the washing up

It’s a pity that Bonnyrigg Rose weren’t playing. After several seasons of playing their home matches at New Dundas Swamp, 86mm of rain falling on their pitch would have made quite an improvement and they would, quite literally, be at home on a pitch like that.

So it might be an early night for me once finish these notes, if I’m lucky. Not like last night where even though I finished my notes early I loitered around until it was actually quite late when I hit the sack.

And there I stayed until all of 06:00 or thereabouts when the loudest crack of thunder that I have ever heard in my life awoke me.

The storm raged for several minutes with some of the brightest flashes that lit up my bedroom despite the thick curtains. And the storm was so close overhead judging my the almost instantaneous thunder. Then it slowly moved away and we could go back to sleep

But not for long because the alarm went off at 07:00 and I had to leave my stinking pit in order to head to the bathroom for a wash and brush up

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d just taken delivery of a beige MkIV Cortina estate that had come from a scrapyard. The windscreen was missing and a few other bits and pieces. It was essentially acquired by me for its parts, to break it, so I’d had it in my drive. Later that night it turned out that it was not my drive at all but a public park somewhere. After I finished work I went over and began to have a look around it. First thing that I wanted to do was to find out its registration number but I thought that that would be difficult with its windscreen broken and tax disc gone. I eventually found a torn-up tax disc that gave the car as “M” reg, which is obviously incorrect. I had a play around with it and found that the radio still worked. After I’d switched off the radio I had my head all around it somewhere, and I heard a car pull up. I looked, and it was someone else. After a while he came into view, the driver, and walked towards where my couple of cars were. I didn’t say anything, I just watched him and stared – it was pitch-black. No-one could see anything, except that he had the light behind him so that I could see it. And staring at him would make him and his senses uncomfortable. Sure enough, after a minute or two he turned round and walked away. He obviously climbed back into his car because it drove off. I was there with this car, and I heard a door slam. I looked around, and sitting on a bench not too far away from me was a schoolboy from Sandbach School. He was feeling very happy, very pleased with himself. Then a few others came to join in. A boy and a girl began to disport themselves on the table. This other boy was teasing this boy and girl and so were one or two of the others. I asked them how much longer they had at school. They said “three weeks” with a big wide grin so I asked them if they were really looking forward to the end of it.

It was mainly MkIII Cortinas that I’d collect. When I had my taxi business people would offer me MoT failures if I would take them away, so I’d take them up to my yard and dismantle them. Sometimes I’d find that with a little welding I could make them better than a car that I was actually using and a couple had a new lease of life, mostly officially, but unofficially, well …

Have you ever done that, by the way? Stared at someone really hard from a distance away? And suddenly then turn round and look in your direction? We used to do that a lot back in the mid-70s when I had that flat on Nantwich Road. We were convinced that people still retained an element of the sixth sense that kept their forebears alive in the time of the sabre-toothed tiger and the other wild beasts of the distant past. It’s a sense that people should work at and develop. No worries with Nerina though. Her sixth sense was very well-developed and worked well on several occasions. I wonder if she ever made good use of it.

But schoolkids fooling around? I used to get on well with schoolkids at one time but these days I don’t see anyone at all, never mind schoolkids, and that’s a shame. I think that kids have a very raw deal from adults and I have a lot of sympathy for them.

Later on I was out with the Inuit again last night. There was a big tribe of them, probably fifty or something of people of all ages. When some white guy came by to study them for a thesis he tried to teach them to all go into a huddle. When he did, there was someone missing, a young girl of about fifteen. We couldn’t find her at all so we had to start again, the count, to verify it. It still ended up as one person short. Then a couple of the Inuit began to discuss the merits of eating human flesh. The meal that they described was quite revolting but I could see that several people were interested in the menu so I promised that if we were going to perform this again I would leave out any reference to humans, their age etc in the hope that they too don’t become dragged off down this road of cannibalism.

Revolting? Like some of Samuel Hearne’s meals when he was out on his travels?

One of my eternal gripes, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, is the number of students who have gone to live amongst the Inuit, the Métisse and other groups, to study their habits and lifestyle as one would study goldfish in a bowl, write their thesis identifying various shortcomings in the dealings of the Canadian Government with those people, proudly receive their PhDs and then go to work in a bank and totally forget the factors raised in their thesis. It strikes me that they believe in all earnestness that the shortcomings are designed specifically for them to study, not to resolve. At what point are the First-Nation people and the Métisse going to be fed up of these interlopers?

Back in the past I remember reading something about the members of Military Intelligence going to the PoW cages of the elite at the end of World War II in order to interview some of the German experts. The writer said something along the lines of that it felt as if he was in a superior fish restaurant, going up to the lobsters in the tank, pointing to a lobster and saying “I’ll have that one, please”. And that’s the impression that I have of these PhD students

And then we were all in the army doing our military service and our period of engagement was drawing to a close. We’d had a whole series of boring lectures. We’d probably had enough so we were larking around making poor use of the time that we had when my friend from Germany appeared. He joined in the general fun and frivolities as we found humour in everything. We were talking about the Wild West and a border dispute between two States where here was a State claiming tolls for crossing a border into another State although the border wasn’t actually there. Some boy had been organising a campaign to refuse to pay it. It had gone one for quite a while. We were joking about the border and the situation about Dodge City came up. We were describing the place with hilarity, the place where every time that a tourist pus his sooty foot in the place, some cowboy is shot by some kind of Indian who pops up on a roof somewhere and they all give a good performance of dying etc, just to take some money off the tourist. My friend turned round to everyone and said “right, we’re going to have a lecture on the Intruder bomber. That’s your very last lecture of your period of service of engagement” so we all finished laughing and joking and gathered round.

No danger of ever catching me anywhere near the Military. Had there been a War during the period when I was eligible to serve, I would have joined the Merchant Marine. "Hello, sailor!" indeed!

By now, dawn was slowly starting to break so I went to have a look out of the window to see what the weather had been doing. And as I expected, we’ve had a sudden snowfall over the past couple of hours.

The entry to the Square here looks really nice at the best of times, with the city walls in the background and the Eglise de Notre Dame de Cap Lihou in the distance. But in this snowy weather it looks even better. The snow gives it quite a nice touch.

It’s no surprise that I want to stay here rather than go anywhere else because this really is a nice building and it’s in a lovely situation, stuck between the city walls and the clifftop with the sea just 25 metres away

On the left we have the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs – the French equivalent of the YMCA where youths can find a tiny box-room to call home – and straight ahead we have the annexe to the Municipal offices. That’s where marriages take place.

There has been quite a bit of snow there too that has fallen just now. I know that it’s nothing compared with what we had in the Auvergne when half a metre would fall in a couple of hours or to what people on Germany and Austria experience every year, but with snow being so rare here, this is enough to bring North-Western France to a standstill

The nurse came along, later than usual, to tell me about the chaos and the slipping and sliding of everyone on the roads this morning. She couldn’t hang around because she had other people to see so she was soon gone

After she left I made a breakfast and began my next book. It’s a story written by someone about his travels in North America in 1795.

Why it’s interesting to me is that he goes at some point in his journey to “Upper Canada” and “Lower Canada” and I reckon that he will almost inevitably travel on the “Chemin du Roy” – the first road to be built in Nouvelle France that linked Montréal and Québec.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I WROTE AN ARTICLE a few years ago about the Chemin du Roy and I’m ready to update it with stuff that I’ve accumulated since those days. Wouldn’t it be nice to include some eye-witness reports of what the road was like from a traveller’s point of view?

So hopefully our hero will at some point find himself in a diligence, or “stage-coach”, flying along the road of Lanouillier and Bécancourt and give me some good information

Back in here I’ve spent most of the day writing notes for the next radio programme and now that’s complete and ready to be dictated. This one wasn’t anything interesting which is a shame because I’ve been enjoying doing these last few “special interest” programmes and can’t wait to do some more.

There were the usual interruptions. Lunch was one of them of course – a cheese and lettuce butty followed by some fruit.

And then my cleaner arrived to do her stuff. We changed the table around and put all the medication in one of the drawers now that they are accessible, instead of having medication scattered about on top of the table looking untidy.

We also had a break for hot chocolate. I really like that, so it’s become something of an enjoyable habit. I could do with a few more like that to cheer me up because, let’s face it, I could do with cheering up.

Tea was sausage, chips and baked beans with cheese. And to liven them up I put some hot chili powder in there. That should get them going, I reckon.

After the chocolate cake and strawberry soya dessert (there was another pot in the fridge) I dashed in here, only to have my hopes dashed.

So what I’ll do is go to bed and hope that I have pleasant dreams and that the thunder doesn’t awaken me.

This afternoon I had a brief chat with Rosemary and I mentioned the storm.

"Did it shake you out of bed?" she asked.

"No" I replied. "I hung on to the rails in the headboard."

And that reminded me of the little girl who came running downstairs and said to her mother "mummy! Mummy! The au-pair is dying!"
"What do you mean, dear?" asked her mother
"Well, mummy" said the girl "she’s lying on the bed gripping the rails in the headboard and going ‘oh God! Oh God! I’m coming!’"
"Is she really?" asked her mother, rather alarmed
"Yes mummy" replied the girl "and she would be too, except that daddy is on top of her holding her down!"

Monday 6th May 2024 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… I might be having another visitor.

Most of the morning has been spent working out routes across half of north-west Europe to see if there’s anything that fits in with someone else’s peripatetic voyages around Europe and who knows? Maybe it’ll all work out.

What I can’t understand is why I suddenly seem to have become the flavour of the month. I’ve already had more visits this year than I’ve had in all the rest of the time that I’ve been here, and there are several more already organised to come

And then here I am with someone else who might want to try to visit.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. I m not usually the sociable type so I don’t visit many people myself, and even fewer since I’ve been disabled, so I’m quite happy usually with my own company – after all, with dissociative identity disorder you are never alone – but nevertheless it’s nice to see real people now and again. Real friends are just as important as your imaginary ones.

So last night, with a great effort, I was only 5 minutes late going to bed. And as usual these days I fell asleep quite quickly, a long time before my little scenario about which I talked last night finished.

And it was another deep intense sleep again. I remember nothing at all of anything that might have been going on. When the alarm went off there was something going on about girls in a school; but it evaporated from my mind as soon as I stood up, which was a shame.

Having switched off the alarm I staggered into the bathroom and then into the dining area for my medication. I then arranged the room how the nurse likes it and prepared for his visit but somehow I had a couple of very severe pains at the top of my hips at the front of my body. It hurt like hell when I walked or lifted my legs.

Despite all of that, and in spite of all of the pain, the nurse changed the dressing on my foot and put on my puttees. He thinks that I won’t need to bother soon because the wound has healed really well. He thinks that soon I can go back to wearing these elasticated socks.

After he cleared off I checked my messages and discovered one asking for travel advice so I’ve been working on that all morning. Crossing Paris by public transport in order to catch a train to come here is quite simple and straightforward, but not for someone who has never seen a train and doesn’t know how a Metro works. You have to explain everything in great detail and make sure that you don’t take things for granted and miss out a step “because everyone knows that”.

After my lunchtime fruit I had a listen to the dictaphonz to find out where I’d been during the night. There was an Avro Lancaster that flew to some remote valley in Austria and landed on a deserted airstrip. It had come from the UK and was full of wounded and full of all kinds of other stuff that the Resistance might need. The wounded were lying around in chairs and in the bomb bay. After every hour they had to change position with someone who was less comfortable than they were and so it went on. They landed on this deserted airfield and unloaded the goods that the Resistance wanted, they unloaded the goods that they’d brought with them, they unloaded the wounded and then collected up a lot of stuff that had been put there for them to take away. They taxied to the end of the runway, turned round and took off from it again. There was some rugby equipment that they’d been told that they could take and all kinds of electronic stuff and electrical stuff. They were leaving things like instructions behind on how to do certain things etc. It was really interesting to see what their plans were but I’ve no idea why they took a lane full of wounded with them to leave behind in Occupied Austria.

There were many occasions where British aircraft, usually Lysanders, would put down in Axis-occupied territory to unload supplies for the Resistance and pick up or drop off passengers, and it’s certainly true that on a couple of occasions larger aircraft did make use of abandoned airfields in Occupied Europe to make a quick landing and take-off on behalf of MI6. However, this idea of dropping off wounded personnel is certainly a novel one.

And then I was in a library checking for a former schoolfriend’s thesis that he’d prepared on leaving school. It had been filed away and referenced but there was no trace of it anywhere in the library no matter how hard we looked. I’d had to make some kind of summary report at one time so I mentioned this and I happened to mention that it would be nice if I had some extra staff. But then it turned into something of an argument with the head of this project saying about my demand for extra staff. I replied that I hadn’t really demanded extra staff – I’d just made a note on the report. That led to a bit of an argument which was a shame because I liked the guy usually. No matter how hard we looked and no matter where we searched there was no trace of this project anywhere. We’d even gone through all the pages of these books that were on display to make sure that it hadn’t been misfiled but there was absolutely no trace of it at all.

That reminds me of my fruitless search in the library of the University of Laval in Québec for one of the theses of the archaeologist Thomas Edward Lee.

The author James Enterline quotes from Lee’s theses which concerned the excavation of what might have been a Norse building in Ungava Bay in the north of Labrador in Canada. He gives the complete references of Lee’s works.

Armed with the details I set off accordingly to the University to track them down in order to refer to them and check Enterline’s information.

Both the theses are registered at the University Library – I know because I saw them on the index – but the librarian and I could only find the second one and not the first one, no matter how hard we looked.

However a very interesting fact was that Lee was a very controversial and confrontational person, not at all your typical academic. His forthright, sometimes intimidating style of writing clearly ruffled a few feathers and his application for a grant for a third year of excavations was refused.

As far as I’m aware, no-one has continued his work and the excavations have lain incomplete for 60 years.

Another disappointment was that having spent a couple of years writing my Magnum Opus on Eustache Lanouillier’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montréal and Québec in the 17th Century, the actual plans for it are also at the University of Laval and I didn’t find that out until later.

The rest of the afternoon has been spent pairing off the music that I chose yesterday and then writing the notes for about half of it. I’ve not really been in any rush to complete it.

The cleaner came round with some soya milk that she found in the local supermarket which was nice. And then LeClerc rang up. They’d seen my complaint about my missing soya milk. Would I like a refund?

And so I explained that I’d rather have the milk, that I’m handicapped and can’t buy it any other way except through them. So sure enough, a delivery driver turned up with 6 cartons of milk later in the day

Tea tonight was a delicious stuffed pepper and there’s stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow night and probably for a leftover curry too. My diet might be monotonous but my meals really are delicious

So that’s all I’m doing for tonight. I’ll be in bed soon ready to rise again nice and fresh for my Welsh lesson, I don’t think

As someone once asked me "what happened to all of your ‘get up and go’?"
The answer to that is simple. I told them "It’s all got up and gone a long time ago."

Saturday 3rd February 2024 – YOU MIGHT THINK …

… that the fact that I crashed out, and quite definitively too . round about 12:00 for a good couple of hours is indicative of the fact that the anti-potassium stuff isn’t the cause of this overwhelming desire to sleep at some point during the day0

However, I remain (for the moment) unconvinced.

The fact is that with the anti-potassium stuff I’m out like a light with no warning whatsoever and don’t even realise that I’ve been asleep. Today though, I awoke tired and spent most of the morning fighting off wave after wave of sleep.

It’s quite surprising really because it wasn’t as if I was late to bed or anything like that, and the night was nothing like as turbulent as some have been just recently.

For a start, none of my favourite ladies put in an appearance and from that point of view it was a very lonely night.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed as usual and took my blood pressure. last night’s was an exciting 17.2/12.3. This morning’s was an interesting 18.1/10.7. and that’s after a relaxing night’s sleep. I wonder what it would be if one of the three girls had come and spent some time with me during the night.

Anyway, I wandered off into the kitchen for my medication and do on and then came back in here.

Things weren’t so simple to start off because I was so tired that I could hardly see. But anyway, after a good while, I began to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There was something about some kind of guy who had killed someone. The person had been put inside a coffin but he raided the coffin, took the corpse out and pounded it again. When he died, he was buried but a lot of people found out where he was buried, where his grave was, so they had this competition of throwing rocks at his grave until they unearthed his coffin, then they continued to throw rocks. He had some kind of coffin with special attachments etc and you could see that they had all been exposed and destroyed. It looked as if the top had come off the coffin but they were still pounding it with rocks. Then other people began to enjoy it. There were all kinds of mysteries happening about other coffins. We came to believe that one of the guys who worked for us was involved in this. The coffins that we’d set aside for us had been badly damaged somehow and no-one knew why. I suggested to my friend that perhaps we really ought to buy some more coffins. My friend immediately thought “that’s rather tempting fate, isn’t it with this guy working for us, making our drinks and food etc? Anything is likely to happen to us”.

As you can see, I have some exciting dreams during the night

But somewhere along the line we were dealing with things when past us in the window went a couple of coaches, old Plaxton Supreme Vs or something belonging to a company in the area. I suddenly remembered that what they did was to hire out their coaches to owner-drivers. They had a lovely V-registration (the old “V”) Volvo Plaxton Elite that was available for hire. I thought that next tie I took a private party onto the Continent I ought to think about maybe going to see them and talk to them about hiring the Volvo instead of hiring from Shearings or from the local company that I used in Crewe.

Later on I was with Hawkwind playing bass and we developed a really new number that we worked on. We were practising it and bashing it out. The producer came in. He heard that we were doing this song but said that there was one line that we had to change, one about being in Keele in April. The song might give the idea to people that everything was OK whereas in fact what we want was in the right character for people to know that it’s not OK … fell asleep here … Anyway so we had to change this lyric but when we did we found that it didn’t scan. I had to stop and think, to try to work on the previous line and the line that we’d just invented so as to make them scan. And then they needed to rhyme too and that was going to be quite a task. One of the players in the group who tried to play this line suddenly leant over and fell against the wall. We all then suspected that something else had been put in this coffee, not just chocolate powder, so we had to prepare a sample ready to go to a laboratory so that it could tell us exactly what it is that’s in there

But not that I would ever have ended up playing bass with Hawkwind of course, much as I would have liked to have done, but there’s a story here too. There are several Hawkwind tracks that I play where when I sing them I change one or two words here and there to change a meaning completely.

Sometimes they scan, and sometimes they don’t. I wonder if you could spot which word I would change in MOONGLUM for example.

And then I was with my friend from the Wirral. His life had completely changed. He’d had a divorce and was running some kind of photography place in the USA. He was over here so we met and we chatted about his new life etc. It turned out that it was his birthday so I said that I’d sent him a present. I had little 25-watt solar kits of a panel, a charge controller and one or two other little appliances. I thought that it would be nice to send it to him as a gift. I packed it up – it was much heavier than I expected – and I had to chisel his address out of him once or twice, his new address, but eventually I was given it. I wrote it down on the brown paper of this parcel but it didn’t stand out very well so I had to hunt for a marker pen to write it. Then it was a little indistinct. Anyway I picked it up and went off. We met somewhere on another car park. He felt the parcel and he thought that it was heavy too. I replied “never mind – it’s a little present for you that will come in the post”. Then I had to find a Post Office that was open. That wasn’t easy. I tried 3 or 4 and eventually found one that would accept it and send it off for me

By the time that I’d written all of that it was break time so I went for my coffee and toasted cheese sandwich, with my rock-hard bread. But nevertheless it still tasted quite nice regardless.

While we’re talking about bread … "well, one of us is" – ed … when I came back here afterwards I found that Sean had written to me about it. he thinks that I’m kneading my dough too hard and I ought to ease up and be as gentle as I was cutting that tile last night.

Looking at things, I do have a tendency to fight with my dough, I suppose. Maybe I shall have to pretend that I’m massaging the clavicles of one of my favourite young ladies.

But on the subject of bread, I remember very well my little voyage to Canada in 2012. I’d been writing a book ABOUT LANOUILLER AND BÉCANCOUR’S CHEMIN DU ROY and although the road was started in the 17th Century, you wouldn’t believe (but it’s true) that it’s still not finished.

Consequently I was determined to drive all the way down to the end to see what happens there.

It actually fizzles out into nothing but nearby is a port where there’s an icebreaker-supply ship that goes out through the ice to supply the outlying islands.

And so I turned up at the port and managed to blag my way on board the ship.

It dropped me off at one of the islands with a promise to come back in a couple of days to pick me up again (and apparently, my family and friends had a whip-round to pay the captain to leave me there) and I found a billet there with an old woman.

She made all of the bread for the island and I had an interesting lesson with her. And she used to have a real fight with her dough.

And one day she asked me to go down to the cellar to bring up a small sack of flour
"I can only see 56lb sacks down here" I shouted
"yes, that’s the small one"

When you are only approvisioned for 8 months of the year I suppose that you have to keep a good stock on hand. That’s what we had to do in the Auvergne – stock up with food. We could have half a metre of snow overnight and not be able to go anywhere for several weeks.

But anyway, I asked her what she did for fuel because there wasn’t a single tree on the island and I know all about Québec Hydro electricity prices.
"Everyone waits until the water freezes over then they go over on their skidoos to the mainland to cut down the trees and drag them back"
"Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look the type to go over the ice on a skidoo"
"I don’t" she replied. "But everyone else does. How do you think that they pay for the bread?"

That’s what I really call “kneading the dough”.

Yes, I learnt a lot, an awful lot on my voyages to the edge of the World. But as Samuel Gurney Cresswell said after a voyage with M’Clure, "A voyage to the High Arctic ought to make anyone a wiser and better man"

But having said that, look what happened on those last few days in 2019 on my final trip up there.

But I digress … "again" – ed …

Back here I began to write up the rest of the notes for my radio programme as best as I could with all of this sleep going on, but I ended up curled up on my chair asleep, despite the coffee. I must be immune to caffeine.

While I was asleep I was on one of the smaller Channel Islands walking down a footpath, behind a group of people who had a couple of young children. They were walking slowly but I couldn’t go past them. When the footpath came to the sea there were two Martello-type lighthouses really close together, one at the end of the island and the other that I imagined was a French one on some small rock in French waters. We walked on with the sea to our right and round a corner we saw that the crescent moon had a planet shining from within the horns of the crescent. I reached for my phone to take a photo but no matter how I tried I couldn’t switch on the camera. I tried for ages to switch it on but to no avail

That’s how deep the sleep was. I was miles away, quite literally too. But how many times have I had this dream about my camera not working? It was night after night after night some time not so long ago

This afternoon I didn’t do very much – just watched the highlights of a couple of football matches from last night and made a start on a little project that I’d been promising to do for a while.

Then I knocked off for an early tea. Burger on a bap with vegan salad and chips. Delicious as usual. My air fryer is really working well and I’m pleased that I decided to buy one.

Tea was early because there was football on the Internet – FALKIRK v TNS In the Scottish Challenge Cup.

Although it’s a Scottish competition clubs from England, Wales and Northern Ireland are invited to compete and TNS have fought their way all the way to the semi-finals

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m no fan of TNS, and for several reasons too, but when they are flying the flag for the Land of my Grandmother (and mine) on foreign soil, they’ll receive all the support that I can give them

But what if they were playing a team from Canada? Having a grandmother from each country would make life rather complicated.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you the score of the game. I’ve posted a link to the match and if you want to see how it ended, you’ll just have to watch it.

So now that I’ve finished my notes, I have to start work.

There are three lots of radio programmes that need to be dictated and that’ll take a while. But as Hamfast Gamgee said, "It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish" so I’d better get a move on.

After all, as Mona Lott said in “It’s That Man Again”, "It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going"

However I always remember a character in the old 1950s radio programme “Dragnet” say "It’s no crime to get lost" and so I will.

Goodnight.

Saturday 3rd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… really bad fall today.

And this one is the worst that I’ve had. Even worse than the one on the boat coming back from Jersey last summer.

And not only that, it’s much more worrying too. usually what happens is that all of a sudden there’s no sensation at all in my right leg and when I put my foot down I simply fall over gently as if there’s no leg there.

However today, it was the left leg, my good (or maybe I should say less bad) leg, there was a stabbing pain all the way up my left leg and I had a really heavy fall.

It happened on the car park at Noz and I wasn’t able to stand up afterwards. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to Caliburn and lean on him to help me up.

Right now, I can’t move without being on crutches and each time I try to stand up or put my leg in an unusual position the pain comes back.

It’s not a “broken leg” type of pain but definitely a muscle or nerve issue. I’ll have to wait until the physio next comes to see me and have a chat with him. In the meantime I’ll be taking it easy

Not that I took it easy during the night. I stayed up until I finished the notes for the day in Canada 2017 on which I’d been working so that I could go to bed with a clean slate.

But once more, we seem to be back in the “tossing and turning during the night” stages. I thought that we’d got over all of that, but apparently not.

When the alarm went off this morning I was fast asleep again and it was a struggle to beat the second alarm.

There were a few things that I needed to do before setting out and then Caliburn and I went out to the shops.

And today I didn’t buy a thing at Noz. It really was a waste of time going and had I known how it would turn out I wouldn’t have gone at all.

At LeClerc I bought everything that I needed (although I bet that I’ve forgotten something) and then went to the appliances department in a separate building to buy a gas cylinder for my sodastream

Back here I had a fight with the freezer to fit in the beans that I’d bought and then settled down with my coffee and cheese on toast.

Regrettably, I crashed out for a while too. That’s becoming a habit, it seems, whenever I go out and about.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I was a passenger on a coach trip with a young girl, someone like my youngest sister. We were in like a ballroom place sitting down talking. There were all kinds of things happening. We’d left the room for some reason but when we returned the band was just striking up a waltz. I grabbed hold of whoever I was with and we waltzed into the room. We were the only couple on the dance floor. my friend from Germany was there so she took her husband and they began to dance. We began to have a ballroom dance-type of thing. My partner wasn’t particularly good but I was able to guide her around somewhat. It began to be a nice pleasant evening.

Later on there was a family, something like the Lyons (as in “Life of Lyons”) family who lived at 222 some street or other. One of their children had to go to the radio centre to introduce a radio show. I went to pick him up. First of all I was surprised. I was expecting mansions, all this kind of thing but they were just modern terraced houses in a big square. I drove around and found the house. What was interesting here was that there was no front door. The living room overflowed into a common area. The doors behind went into the kitchens and bedrooms. I could hear the children talking in there. I recognised the voices so I went and knocked on the door leading to the back and they began to come out.

At that moment though I had a horrible attack of cramp in my left calf and that awoke me so I’ll never know how that would have ended..

Finally I had to go to a Tax Office last night to take all my papers. The first thing that I had to do was to take a plastic bag in which to put everything. There was a big pile of them. I took one that implied that I was Moroccan. I don’t know why I did that. I put all my papers in and had to join this queue. There were probably 20 clerks sitting at a long desk. You just went to stand at the desk and one of them would talk to you. I handed all the papers of my employment to her. I was marked down as “leaving definitively”. I had to hand in another certificate to the guy sitting next to this girl. He looked at it and said “we already have these. You didn’t need to bring this”. I replied “I bring everything anyway”. he began to go through all my paperwork with the girl. he asked me “do you have any more income with the Commonwealth?”. I replied “no”.

The rest of the day has been spent feeling sorry for myself and writing up the notes for the next day’s walk (in the days when I could walk) around Québec.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that years ago I wrote something about THE CHEMIN DU ROY from Montreal to Québec. I started from Repentigny because I wasn’t sure of the route out of Montreal but over time I traced the route and so I was on foot from the centre of the town out as far as the Jacques Cartier Bridge and a little bit futher east.

And one thing that I’ve often wondered. In North America most of the landmarks are named for the first European who actually saw them. I always wondered what Jacques Cartier must have said when he sailed up the St Lawrence to what in those days was the Iroquois settlement of Hochelaga in 1535 and saw that massive bridge.

There was a burger that had been in the fridge for a while and when I inspected it this evening I decided that the best thing to do with it would be to file it under CS. Consequently I had a further fight with the freezer and put one of the two remaining lasagne slices in there to keep

The other one, I ate tonight with a vegan salad and it was all extremely delicious. I’m really impressed with that lasagne, that’s for sure.

Not so impressed with my health though. It seems that I only have to think about going back to the Land of my Great Grandfather and I have a bad fall, just like last year.

However that time, I ignored it and went all the same, and look how that turned out. I think that my body is trying to tell me something.

What I’ll do for now is to carry on around the Port of Montreal ship-spotting and when things quieten down, dictate some radio notes that I’ve prepared.

No alarm tomorrow. I’ll have a good lie-in. But I have to be a-baking though. I’ve run out of fruit buns. No idea where I’m going to put the ones that need to be stored though. We’re back to where we were ages ago with not even the hint of a place to put stuff

Well, it’ll all work out somehow. It usually does. I just wish that I would.

Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

… for tea tonight was actually quite good.

There’s room for improvement of course but bearing in mind that this is the first one that I’ve made since I was living in Reyers more than 25 years ago, it was by no means disappointing.

There wasn’t enough filling, but that’s a minor problem. There’s enough food left nevertheless to make two more meals so it’s just as well that it worked.

What I did was to put some lentils in the slow cooker and slowly bring them to the boil. Then they were rinsed and put back in with clean water and some basil, oregano and tarragon. Mind you, I almost forgot to rinse them and had to leave my comfortable bed to do that.

Later on this afternoon I added some bulghour and later still, because there was still plenty of water, I added some porridge oats to soak it up and stiffen the mix.

At teatime I fried an onion and garlic with more of the herbs, added my mix from the slow cooker and some tomato concentrate, then layered alternate layers of pasta sheet and my cooked mix, topped it off with a thick cheese sauce and baked it in the oven, and away we went.

During the night I went away too. So much so that for a change just recently I wasn’t up before the alarm. It awoke me with a start when it went off but I didn’t hang around at all in bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone notes. And I really Had been away. Back at Hogwarts at one point too during the night with HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE seeing the kids at their dance. Ron had split up from Lavender Brown. There was another girl there who was sulking for some reason or other. Ron went to ask her to dance but she replied “they aren’t playing our tune”. All her friends told him to leave her alone. Just then the music started to play it so a couple of people went to dance her and missed. She moved away. I don’t know what happened to Ron and this girl then but Hermione was there dancing with someone whom I didn’t know when the dance floor collapsed. They carried on dancing and it looked as if they would dance into the ladies’ lavatory. Someone just coming out of the door said to hermione “do you want some paper as well?”. It all was very strange.

Back in Harry Potter again later and there was something about spying on someone’s house. It was very difficult to do. There was a fallen tree with its branches and we had to hide ourselves in the fallen tree’s branches to do it. We piled into a car and set out to drive. There was a lot of traffic and I was weaving in and out of it and almost had a collision with someone. They went in front of me and put their brakes on to slow down so I did too. We had a slow drive with all the traffic on the road. We came to Barbridge where there was a fallen tree in the middle of the road. I said to the others “lock your doors and hang on because this is a trap” thinking that someone had cut down the tree for it to fall across the road to stop us and ambush us when we left the vehicle to see what was happening.

Later still I’d seen an AC Cobra for sale in the local newspaper so Laurence and I went round to see it with Roxanne. It was somewhere off nantwich Road in Crewe so we eventually managed to find the house. We walked straight into the house without knocking. We found the car in a downstairs room covered by a blanket. First of all my taxi detector wouldn’t work. Then I realised that an AC Cobra wouldn’t have been a taxi anyway. Found the guy and his wife sitting in a room next door, not in the least perturbed by the fact that we were in their house. We went back into the room and began to look around at this vehicle. He told me that he wanted £30,000 for it, which I thought was cheap. But that turned out to be the deposit to take it for a test drive – it was really £250,000. There was no way that I could afford that. I pretended that I was interested and got down to look underneath it. It was quite badly rotten around the edges. I thought to myself “he’s asking for a lot of money for something in this kind of condition. Even if I were to buy it, I didn’t have the mobility to crawl around underneath it with welding tackle etc these days. There’s no way that I could consider this vehicle” but I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d had a good look around to find out what else was wrong.

I was back in this dream again later on and we were leaving. Down at the bus station was a bus going to Mold. We were saying our goodbyes but the driver prepared to close the doors. This woman and I ran to the door and scrambled aboard. We had a look for the guy who was with us but he wasn’t on board. By now the bus had set off. I thought “never mind. We’re on here and Roxanne is on here”. I asked for two and a half to Mold. he smiled and said “I’m not going to Mold”. “Well, take us to wherever you’re going”. He gave me two and a half tickets which came to 11/-. The first thing that I did was seeing as I had some money ready I said that I’d give him the shilling but it was a £10 note. Then I had a 10/- note for him. He looked at me and asked “is that correct?”. I suddenly realised that I’d done, took the £10 note back and gave him 1/-. I went to sit down and to worry about contacting the other guy later. There were 2 boys on the bus who made some kind fo remark about me handing over a £10 note and how did I spot it from that distance? I replied “when you reach a certain age you don’t look at the money, you can smell the difference between the notes.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent on Day Two of my 2017 trip to North America and the page is practically finished. However, we did hit an obstruction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one thing always leads to another, and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

The subject of Marguerite de Bourgeoys cropped up on that web page.

She was a big friend of Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal and she was on one of the very first emigrant voyages to Nouvelle France where she occupied herself with spiritual works and the welfare of the filles du roi, the young girls from orphanages who were sent out to become brides for the soldiers who remained there to settle after having been discharged from the army.

They both came from Troyes which was on my shuttle route between Virlet and Brussels so on the very last time that I drove the route, instead of doing it overnight as I usually did, I took a whole week and visited every place of interest that I could find along the way.

One of the places that I visited was the family home of the Chomedeys and I found all of my photos. But seeing as Troyes is such a beautiful old town I took dozens of photos of many old house and I couldn’t remember which one was his.

No trace of the notes that I made, which was a surprise – especially as they were written up from the following day all the way back to Virlet.

In the end, I had to dive back into the bowels of the back-up disk and find the dictaphone recordings from the journey and re-transcribe the notes for the relevant day and mate them to the photos.

That’s another project that I’ll have to do one of these days. The road between the Belgian border at Rocroi and down to Nevers is one of the most beautiful and historic in all of France. I had a plan that when I was stuck for something to do (whenever that might be) I’d pick a long road like that, explore it thoroughly and write a book about it.

The TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY was done in 2010, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and I’m doing Version 2.0 even as we speak.

After that, I wrote a pile of stuff about Lanouiller and de Bécancour’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montreal and the city of Québec and all the way down the “Forgotten Coast” as far as it’s possible to go.

The road between Rocroi and Nevers was to be the third of the trilogy but ill-health and feeling sorry for myself somehow conspired to get in the way of all of my plans.

Someone else for whom I was feeling sorry for was the physiotherapist. He came by at 17:00 to tell me that he’s busy and will be back at 19:30. That was a major inconvenience, disrupting my evening like that and I made sure that he knew.

Rosemary phoned me at lunchtime and we had another one of our marathon chats that go on for ever. She’s being swept up by the turn of events and it’s not easy for “a stranger in a strange land” to deal with some of the things that go on. It’s not something that bothers me too much because I couldn’t care less, but Rosemary is much more sensible and focused than I ever am.

After she hung up, I went for a shower to clean myself up ready for His Nibs to come round and put me through my paces

As I mentioned earlier, tea was delicious. And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have to nip into town which will do me good. And then I have to carry on with Canada 2017 and sort out the mess that will be Trans-Labrador Highway Version 2.0

So once I finish that I’ll have to do Rocroi-Nevers next, then carry on with the Arctic stuff, go back and carry on with the Emigrant Trails stuff, organise the Grand Banks trips and probably 1000 other things too.

Never mind anything else – I’m far too busy to die right now.

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

… that banks would stop employing cashiers who wear low-cut tee-shirts. When this one today leant over the counter to give me my US dollars in a fashion so that we could count them together, I was totally distracted and I have no idea how much she gave me.

It’s definitely bad for my health, all of this.

Last night was slightly better. I slept all the way through until the racket from the fridge and the air-conditioning awoke me at about 04:00. But I soon went back to sleep until the alarms went off.

Breakfast for some reason didn’t start to be served until 08:00 so I had plenty of time to attack the notes from yesterday, and I’d even finished by the time that they opened the dining room, which is always encouraging.

Afterwards, I had a shower and washed my clothes from yesterday. I’ll be washing myself away at this rate if it keeps on like this.

A little later, I went out into town, stopping off for a bottle of water and to explore the shopping mall just down the road.

And why is shopping in North America so boring? Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops, you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Down the road at the foot of the hill by the Parc Viger is this beautiful building.

Dating from the early years of the 20th Century, it was formerly the Montreal Technical School but today it’s the BANQ – the Bibiliothèque and Archives National de Québec.

I’ve taken shelter there from the rain once a few years ago, but I’ve never actually visited it. However, it is my destination for this morning.

While you admire one of the most beautiful interiors that I have ever seen, let me tell you my story.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago I wrote a pile of stuff about the Chemin du Roy, the road that was built by Pierre Robineau de Bécancour and Jean Eustache Lanouiller in he early 18th Century to link Montréal and Québec

I wrote at the time that I would one day have to visit the National Archives to find the original maps of the route, because much has been lost in the subsequent 300 years.

So here I am.

But I’m in for a massive disappointment.

There are indeed record of the route, that’s for sure. But they are held at the archives site in Québec, not Montreal. So I need to go there instead.

And where are the BANQ archives in Québec? Why, on the campus at the University of Laval of course.

Ring any bells?

But all is not lost. It wasn’t a total waste of time.

I’ve been wondering for years about the track arrangements at the Gare Viger – how the platforms were actually laid out in relation to the buildings, and here I struck gold.

On the wall was an exhibition of the area, and one of the exhibits was a map of the area 100 years or so ago which showed everything that I wanted to know.

The station was subsequently modernised and extended, and this meant that the track layout needed to be changed.

And while I wasn’t able to see a plan of how the station layout was configured afterwards, there was a handy aerial photograph hanging on the wall that showed at least some of the train sheds.

So I might not be any the wiser, but I’m certainly better-informed.

The Gare Viger dates from the turn of the 20th Century. But before this, there was an earlier Canadian Pacific railway station in the eastern side of the city – the Gare Dalhousie.

It was from here that the first trans-continental train set out in 1886 (and we’ve all noticed that, once again, the Maritime Provinces have been totally ignored by the official Canadian History. According to them, there’s nothing except eskimoes and indians east of Montreal and they don’t count for anything)

After the opening of the Gare Viger it became a freight depot and then an industrial warehouse. However it’s recently undergone a programme of renovation and they have done a good job here.

It’s now a circus school, and seeing as it was formerly a Canadian Pacific building, that is quite appropriate. Clowns should feel right at home here.

Down on the docks Oakglen is still there, as we might expect, but we have another bulk carrier down at the far end.

She’s the Gullwing, a Maltese bulk-carrier of 39000 tonnes and was built in 2011, although you might not think it.

She’s come in from Quebec after an exhausting tour around the Pacific, and were I going to visit my friend Rhys I would hop aboard because according to the port authorities her next stop is Charleston in South Carolina.

Also in the far end of the harbour was a huge MSC container ship.

No chance of reading its name from here unfortunately but according to the port records, there’s an MSC Alyssa in port and she seems to fit the bill.

She’s of 61500 tonnes and has arrived from Liverpool. And were I to want to go back to Leuven for my next hospital appointment I would immediately leap aboard, because her next port of call is Antwerp.

The brats still aren’t back at school yet in Montreal, and so the children’s entertainment is in full swing.

I was impressed by the pirate ships, and even more impressed by the fact that the kids were being allowed to swing on ropes and slide down zip wires and all of that.

Can you imagine that in the stupid nanny-state UK where the ridiculous Health and Safety rules are such that you even need a fire safety certificate to wave a flag at a football match.

But I haven’t come here to waste my time.

I had it on good authority that there was a cruise ship in town ready to do a voyage down the St Lawrence and the Eastern seaboard of the USA, and so I went for a look.

And here we have the Seabourn Quest, all 32,500 tonnes of her and built as recently as 2011, which is quite modern for a cruise ship. We’ve seen some thoroughly ancient and disreputable ones in our time.

Unfortunately the quay was heavily guarded so if Strawberry Moose and I want to nip aboard, we’d have to buy some tickets.

The little tender alongside her is the Juno Marie.

She’s officially described as a tanker, and being small like this, her task is very likely to be to fuel up the larger ships in the docks as they arrive so that they are ready to set sail as quickly as possible.

There are a few of these little tankers in port and we’ve seen at least one of them before.

When I was here last October I’d finally managed to make it to the real centre of the city where it all was happening back in the 17th Century but I didn’t have time to go far.

One of the places that I hadn’t seen was the old Ursuline convent, or what remains of it.

This organisation of the “Grey Nuns” was founded here in Montreal in 1737 by Marguerite d’Youville and they ended up over time with quite an impressive range of buildings here.

Their claim to fame is that they were the first female religious organisation to undertake the full range of social and charitable aims.

There had been many people engaged in these tasks before, and we’ve talked in the past about people like Marguerite Bourgeoys.

But they just had their little niche of interest, not the whole range.

There was a large hospital on the site too, as well as a very large and impressive church, if the old drawings are anything to go by.

But as the city expanded northwards and eastwards away from the river, and as the port of Montreal expanded along the banks, it was deemed necessary to make a new road network connecting the two.

And so the Ursulines had to go, and so did some of their buildings.

Luckily, not all was demolished. There are still some remains of the impressive buildings that are now classed as Historical Monuments.

And if you look very carefully in the roadway, you’ll see lines of granite setts – there are a couple in the photo here.

When they were doing some roadworks a while ago they came across the foundations of the old walls that had been demolished. They have marked them out on the road with the granite setts so that you can see the extent of the former buildings

As I was making my way round to the Place d’Youville I noticed this building in the distance.

Whilst the building itself is impressive, the exciting thing about it is that over the door is carved the legend “Grand Trunk”.

This was one of the earliest of the main-line railway companies that was involved in the “railway wars” in Canada at the end of the 19th Century.

This was their magnificent Head Office in the Rue McGill, built 1899-1902.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long. The Grand Trunk was one of the biggest losers in the Railway War and it was coming back from a very unsuccessful fund-raising trip in Europe in 1912 that its president, Charles Hays, was drowned on the Titanic.

The company quickly went bankrupt and was taken over by the Government, forming part of the Canadian National rail network.

Montreal these days is basically a very large island, but back in the 16th Century it was several small ones.

The original settlement was on a small island bounded by the St Lawrence River and the Riviere St Pierre.

That latter river was eventually built over, and today, it’s the Place d’Youville, named for our friend Marguerite.

When we were here in October last year, you will remember seeing the excavations that were taking place just here.

This was the site of the city’s first indoor covered market which later became the Parliament Building for the country.

However the building was destroyed in 1849 in the riots that followed the passing of an Act emancipating the rebels of the 1830s and was never rebuilt. The Government of Canada moved elsewhere, much to the chagrin of the Québecois.

A fire station was erected here in 1903 – 54 years too late to save the Parliament building unfortunately.

Today the fire brigade has moved elsewhere and the building is now a museum. I would have liked to have gone for a look around but I was rather pushed for time.

I still have quite a lot to do today and it’s late.

While I was standing by the side of the road taking photographs, I was interrupted by a street washer.

Mind you, he didn’t let me interrupt him, and carried on with whatever he was doing.

As a result, not only did I have a complimentary shoe-wash I had a complimentary ankle wash too and that certainly different. And it wasn’t just me either. Several other passers-by were in the same boat.

Further interruptions were the order of the day too.

While I was a-wandering a little further on (which is rather better than walking by St Paul’s), I heard the familiar wail of a diesel locomotive siren in the distance so I legged it rather rapidly down the street.

Not rapidly enough, as it happens. I was defeated by the pair of locomotives, 4707 and his friend, disappearing into the distance down towards the dock.

And when I return home and have access to myJane’s Train Recognition Guide I’ll tell you all about them.

Instead, I went back to the Place d’Youville and to photograph the stele. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last year when I was here it was all fenced off and it was impossible to take a proper photo.

So having done that, Bane of Britain wandered away from the site, without actually going over there to read the plaque to discover what it says.

I really don’t know why you lot pay me, honestly I don’t.

You DO pay me, don’t you? All you need to do is to click on one of the links at the side and make your next order from Amazon that way. I receive a small commission on your orders, but it costs you nothing at all.

I’m not sure at all what was going on here.

There I was, standing on the edge of the kerb and three or four fire engines pulled up, one after the other. Their blue and red flashing lights blazing away.

They performed some kind of danse macabre in the street and I’ve no idea why. There was nothing like any emergency that I could see in the vicinity and they didn’t seem to be in too much hurry.

I turned my attention to the building that I had come here to see – the old Customs House.

Ideally situated at the exit to the harbour, nothing could come into port without paying the appropriate duty to the Government and this was where they did it.

The Customs people aren’t there now- they’ve moved on down the road into a new modern building that is 10timesasbig, even though trade in the port has declined.

By now, my stomach was thinking that my throat had been cut and I needed to organise some food.

Not round here though as I still had some important things to do.

So onto the Metro at Victoria-OACI and off to Namur (the Metro station, not the town in Belgium) and the big Walmart there. But leaving the metro station was really difficult. The way that the doors are positioned there was a howling gale every time someone opened one of them and it was something of a struggle to pass through.

It all seems to have changed there. New buildings and the like and I couldn’t at first get my bearings. But there’s a Subway at the bottom end of the shopping complex so I installed myself there.

The restaurant next door had a free wifi service so I was able to patch in there and pick up the news.

It was a long hike to Walmart from there – longer than I remember it being – and it was something of a disappointment when I arrived. It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer items on the shelves these days and the place is looking rather untidy.

There weren’t all that many customers there either and I’ve no idea why.

There wasn’t as much choice as I was hoping but I managed eventually to kit myself out with the remainder of the articles that I need. Whether it’s all suitable I really don’t know, but I can’t do any better than this.

But here’s a shop that I hadn’t seen before, even though the staff tell me that they have been here for four years.

It’s called the Bulk Barn and it’s very reminiscent of the old “Weigh and Save” shops that we had in the UK in the late 70s and 80s.

And I’ll make a note of this place because they had everything in there that I could possibly use, including dehydrated vegetables for travelling purposes.

I’ll have to check to see if there are any of these places anywhere else on my route around Canada in the future.

By now it was rush hour and time for me to be heading off.

I was lucky that I was on the train because had I been in a car I would probably still be there now judging by the amount of traffic on the Boulevard Decarie.

Total gridlock and that’s the kind of thing that makes me glad that I don’t live in a city these days. How would I cope with all of this.

Back at my hotel I organised my suitcase yet again to take into account my recent purchases. This suitcase is becoming rather uncomfortably full.

There was some work that needed to be done, so I caught up with that, and then decided to go out for tea.

I walked the entire length of the rue St Catherine Est from my hotel almost all the way down to the bridge and I was not alone.

Apparently the students from McGill University are having their induction week this week and it’s party, party, party. Hordes of them freaking out all over the place.

It made me feel quite old to watch them. These days they don’t look anything like 18 year-olds at all and that’s all very confusing.

But the big surprise for me was the pizza place that was advertising vegan pizzas – yes, vegan pizzas! I’ve never ever seen vegan pizzas advertised in a mainstream pizza place before so I went in to give the place some support.

And delicious it was too.

That was me organised (such as I can be) for the day. I retreated to my hotel and decided to have an early night. I need it too after all of this.

Tuesday 19th September 2017 – HAVING BEEN …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, don’t count on the official signs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here we had a moment of excitement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m definitely beginning to feel the pace now.

Tuesday 18th August 2015 – LAST DAY IN MONTREAL

Last night’s sleep wasn’t anything like as good as the previous night’s, but that can be explained by the fact that as soon as I came in last night, I drank about a litre of spruce beer.

Being on my travels didn’t help matters either. I’d spent much of the night in the company of a young person who was having gender issues. He or she had half-undergone the hormone therapy necessary to change sex, but then had had a change of mind and not only stopped the treatment but was changing back. This led on from here to me taking a taxi – one of mine as it happens – to go to a white house somewhere. The driver was completely new – I was his first customer – and the journey was interesting to say the least, including undertaking another driver at a road junction and overshooting the destination. The driver said “well that was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?” to which I replied “don’t worry. We all have to start somewhere”.

So after breakfast I cracked on with some more work on the computer and this took me right up until 11:00. I had my airport shuttle booked for 11:15 and didn’t want to miss it, so I made sure that it arrived on time by pouring myself a full cup of coffee at 11:14 precisely. Works every time!

It took 5 minutes to get to the airport from where this hotel is, and I spent the time helping out a couple of people who needed to travel into the city. There was a 747 bus already in at the stop and the driver took 10 minutes to sort himself out, during which time a woman with three kids came onto the bus. She told them to sit down “as it’s going to be a long ride”
“And if I know anything about Montreal bus drivers, a wild ride too” I added.

And sure enough, off we shot and arrived at the coach station at the rue de Berri just 35 minutes later, shaken but not stirred.

Ten dollars it cost to leave my bag in the consigne, which is quite expensive, but then imagine what it would have cost in time and so on to go all the way back to the hotel to pick it up and then lug it all the way back here through the city later this evening. This had to be the sensible option – the hotel shuttle to the airport and then the 747 bus directly to the coach terminal.

And I can’t believe this but in a Dollar Store just round the corner from the bus station as I continue my stroll down rue St Catherine Est I find exactly the right adapter for the Swiss electrical plugs. That’s an amazing find, and something else to add to the travel bag

This is a beautiful little street isn’t it – a pile of beautiful little houses down there and some typical Quebec maisonettes of the type that you see in all of the urban areas.

Balconies and open staircases – must be beautiful to sit outside on them on a lovely summer’s evening but it must be hell, absolute hell in the middle of a Quebec winter trying to get to your front door.

But why I stopped was to look at the corner of the street at this new building is that it’s the site of the Ouimetoscope.

That was the very first cinema to be opened in Montreal – in January 1906 in fact, and the following year was rebuilt to be come the largest cinema in North America at the time.

There’s some kind of scheme going on here in Montreal at the moment – what they call the Piano Publique. They have dumped a load of pianos about in different parts of the city and are encouraging people to sit down and play them.

This guy isn’t too bad at all as it happens. I could sit and listen to him for quite a while, but I just don’t have the time.

Look at this gorgeous art-deco building here on the corner of St Catherine and Alexandre Deseve, at 1560 rue St Catherine Est. There’s been a “Club Sandwich” here in the past as well as an Irish bar and the Hotel Bourbon.

It’s the Complexe Bourbon, quite a favourite spot in the city in the past, and at one time was up for sale for $8,500,000, but that was several years ago. It looks as if it will be pulled down before its much older and what a shame because it’s beautiful.

This church was formerly the Sacre Coeur de Jesus down at the end of the rue Alexandre Deseve.

The church doesn’t function as a church any more and the big house at the side, the ancienne Presbytere, is now a centre d’accueil pour les jeunes en difficulte – possibly the Association les Chemins du Soleil which is situated, according to a poster that I saw plastered about the church, at 1155 rue Alexandre Deseve.

At the parc Charles Campbell, a lawyer and philanthropist of the 19th Century who left all of his money to create parks for children to amuse themselves in the open air, they are having a Neighbourhood Fair tonight, with entertainment, food and all kinds of stuff going on.

And you might not be able to see him but there’s a guy sitting in that tree just there pulling that banner up at the far end of that rope.

I had lunch at the Subway down here, asked once again if i wanted cheese with my “nothing but crudites”, and ended up by dropping half of it on the floor and making a huge mess everywhere.

But after lunch I strolled down to the metro station to tale the train all the way down to Honore Beauregard, the end of the line

That’s the view down rue Sherbrooke est down towards the famous Olympic Stadium and its leaning tower. Anyway, I’ll walk down here for a little while, the old Chemin du Roy, and see what I can find, if anything.

Right by the Langelier metro station is a Motel le marquis. Cheapest room is about $80 – not too bad, I suppose. I’ll have to remember that.

And from here I caught a bus that took me all the way down the Boulevard Langelier towards the Galeries d’Anjou.

That’s all of the big buildings near the end of the autoroute at the junction between Highway 40 and Highway 25 there and the Galeries d’Anjou are somewhere to the right of that.

And I’ve found the Value Village! Furthermore, it’s 30% off on Tuesdays for senior citizens! Spend! Spend! Spend! But I could only find one book and one CD that interested me. Rather a waste of a senior citizen’s discount if you ask me.

Canadian Tire have tents at $29:99 and $34:99- that’s the three-seater one which is 7 feet wide so my bed will fit in there quite comfortably whereas the cheaper one is only 6 feet at its widest and that might be a struggle. Then we start to get into the realm of big tents after that. I mean, why would you have a tent to sleep 14 people? I don’t even know 14 people, let alone 14 people with whom I’d like to go away on holiday, but then they do go in for big families in Quebec.

In rue Jean Talon I’ve just seen the rustiest cars that I’ve ever seen, any of mine and the Cortina parked down my field since 1997 included. I didn’t take a photo of it because it isn’t the polite thing to do but it’s so rotten that the windscreen is about to drop out – the whole windscreen surround including the roof corners have just gone. Makes that grey Cortina look good and that’s stood in a field for 18 years.

And it’s suddenly occurred to me what I haven’t seen at all ever since I’ve been in Canada on Saturday, and I haven’t seen a cat.

This is the sports ground at the rue Jean Talon and way over there behind the floodlights in the distance and across the motorway behind it is the motel where I stayed the very first night that I was ever in Canada.

But what had caught my eye was the drinking fountain so I had a good wash to cool me down, filled my cap with water and stuck it on my head. All of the cold water ran off down the back of my neck and believe me, it was the best feeling that I had ever had.

I got to see one of the new Transits from close up and I reckon that there are differences to the European ones inside. In fact there seem to be quite a few differences so I wonder what has happened here that the differences haven’t been carried forward, because it is reasonabily impressive.

There’s no model designation on it either, which surprises me – just a ” Ford”, and made in Kansas City judging by a sticker on the windscreen. Body number begins 1FT(or 2)NR1CM

There’s a little process of gentrification going on in the rue Jean Talon – it’s been a bit down-at-heel in places but in other places there are bits of building going on and it’s all starting to look quite nice

These new bank buildings are on the corner of the Boulevard Viau and rue Jean Talon and are typical of what is going on all around here

I walked on quite a way past Viau, past Pius IX and past a couple of metro stations and by this time I was starting to lose interest. Time was slowly passing on, the only pizza places that I has passed (I really fancied a pizza tonight and I had my cheese all at the ready) were these ethic places full of grease, and I was hot, sticky, exhausted and footsore.

So I hopped onto the metro all the way to Snowdon where I still didn’t find the pizza that I wanted (and I had my vegan cheese all ready too) and eneded up back at the falafel place at the Cote-des-Neiges, for want of anything better.

It was just outside here that I met my first traditional bus driver. There was a bus stop just outside the restaurant and there was a bus just pulling up. I asked him if he was going to the Snowdon metro station down at the bottom of the hill, to which he replied that I was facing the wrong way – the station was just “back there”. And then he drove off.

The station “back there” was in fact the “Cote des Neiges” so I don’t know whether he was having a mental blank or whether he was just being difficult. Anyway, I trudged back up to the Cote des Neiges metro station and went round to the coach station.

Having rescued my suitcase I ended up chatting with two women, one aged 84 and the other aged 91, who were regular bus travellers, even at their age. They were off to visit their third sister somewhere in the USA. This passed the time quite nicely until my bus pulled in, and then I was off.

We went over the Cartier Bridge and then into Longueuil for more passengers, and then we were off. I curled up on my seat and dozed off to sleep.

-2

Sunday 6th April 2014 – WE’RE UP AGAINST IT NOW!

The 1st Xi’s match at St Priest was one that Pionsat needed to win today to keep their survival hopes alive, but they went down 2=0. They are now sucked deep into a relegation battle and have lost their advantage.

But to be fair, it’s not entirely their fault. It’s true that they’ve conceded silly goals at times, but their attack has usually made up for that. But the big issue is that in Division 1, there have been 6 regional pools, giving a total of 60 teams. A mid-table performance is what Pionsat usually manage to do.

However, the Football Association here decided that Division 4 needed bolstering, and so instead of relegating 2 teams at the nd of last season, relegated three from each pool in Division 3. That was what caused Pionsat’s 2nd XI to be demoted when we all thought that they were safe.

This cascaded down through the pyramid and at the top level, Division 1, they simply reduced the level to 4 pools, or 40 clubs. Now, what was a mid-table performance last year is a relegation struggle.

Add to that the fact that with Matthieu injured and Francois retired, there’s no goalkeeper. Michael Bucaud has performed better than anyone could have hoped and has certainly done the team proud, but it isn’t the same.

I was also told that the trainer walked out on the club just before the start of the season and took three players with him to his new club. How true this is, I really don’t know and it’s not my place to pass comment, but all of this sums up Pionsat’s struggle.

Michael, who was injured in goal last week, was unable to play and so young Frederic took over again for today.

He certainly didn’t let the side down either – in fact he looked pretty useful and made a couple of really good stops, including a brave save with his feet, going the wrong way, in a one-on-one with a St Priest attacker.

It was the first goal that was a killer and we hadn’t had even 2 minutes of play. They surged forward from the kickoff and hit the bar with a blistering shot from about 15 yards out.

That ballooned up into the air and the follow-up shot – St Priest being the quicker to react – likewise smacked against the bar and bounced down and away. However the linesman (the home linesman, it has to be said) signalled that the ball had crossed the line.

The second goal was also something of a sucker punch too. Pionsat were too busy disputing a decision to respond to a quickly-taken free kick, and that let in a St Priest attacker.

Not much that Frederic could do about that, but then as we know, the Pionsat defence does have a habit of switching off at vital moments. It’s not the first time.

Strangely enough, this was one of Pionsat’s better defensive displays. St Priest had a player, the n°10, who was streets ahead of everyone else on the field, and it showed when he managed to wriggle free and find some space. However, for most of the match Vianney and Alex were clinging to him like a limpet.

And Alex’s performance in the centre of the defence was the best I’ve seen for quite a while from anyone. He’s played like this a few times and he’s be my first name on the team sheet every week if he could keep going like this. Apart from the two efforts that led to goals, St Priest didn’t have much of a look-in and it was a dour struggle in midfield for much of the game.

Pionsat’s attack looked tired, though, and it seems as if the fire has gone out in a couple of the players. They need to find some way of kindling some enthusiasm because they play so much better when they are enjoying themselves.

And so what else?

Well, shock, horrow, there I was, lying in bed this morning for quite a while, thinking to myself that it must be late and I ought to get up, only to find when I finally did leave my pit that it was all of 08:35. I don’t think that I’ve ever been awake that early on a Sunday morning.

I’d had a busy night too. I’d been to a street concert given by Mark Knopfler, featuring songs off his Golden Heart album. We were having to stand round the side of the stage and the camera was filming around the corner, almost as if it were a bootleg recording and we weren’t supposed to be there.

As the xoncert continued, I found myself in a bed, right in front of tha stage. A girl who had slept in it earlier expressed surprise that I could sleep there like that, to which I replied that I had a lot to do when the concert was over and so I needed to be fresh.

She wondered how on earth I could sleep through all of the noise, to which my answer was that it comes with necessity and practice.

After breakfast I tidied up a little, and I can now see the floor in places up here. That is progress. But when I became fed up with doing that, I carried on with the web pages.

After returning from the footy, I completely jigged them around to make a proper circular tour (in fact, it’s a figure-of-8 tour of Quebec now) and they are all on line. This link is for the Chemin du Roy and this link is for the walking tour of Quebec.

Have a good read, and I hope that you enjoy that as much as I enjoyed writing it all.

Let me know if any of the links are bad.

-3

Thursday 13th March 2014 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER DAY …

… where I’ve not been in too much of a hurry to leave my bed.

I put that down to still being awake at 03:45 this morning, and so getting up at … errr … 10:20 is not too unreasonable.

I’ve hardly done any work either – well – not that kind of work anyway. The house remains practically untouched. But noticing when I went downstairs that the batteries were aleady fully-charged, and at 12:30 there was 50.5 amps going into the dump load and the wires were pretty warm, that called for action. I plugged an extension cable into the overcharge circuit and wired the 12-volt fridge in. That calmed everything down a little. The water still got hot (68°C) but the wires stayed cool-ish and the fridge worked.

I’ll leave it like that until I fix up the new batteries that will replace the existing creaky ones and then I’ll wire in the fridge into the permanent circuit for the summer.

I threw out some food and veg peelings that I had forgotten to deal with before I left here (some of them could have walked to the compost bin on their own) and then unloaded part of Caliburn. For lunch I went to fetch the bread – to find that the boulanger had forgotten to come on Tuesday, and that was really the only reason why I had rushed home.

I had to go down the road to the Intermarché at Pionsat to buy a baguette.

GRRRR!

This afternoon I updated the Trois Rivieres pages of my Canada website

. I took a pile more photos of the town when I was there last year and so they needed to be added on and the commentary written. I’ve also reviewed a few subsequent pages of my drive down the Chemin du Roy

and that has spawned a couple of new pages too.

So I’ve not been idle.

But I do realise now why I try not to work on the computer between 19:00 and 21:00. I get so carried away with what I’m doing that I forget to make tea and I end up going hungry.

And it’s 5 years since my dear friend Liz departed. I can’t believe that it’s been so long. I hope that she is sleeping peacefully. My abiding memory is just before she went for her operation, she was making out a list of names.
“Are these the people that I need to contact to let them know your news?” I asked.
“Ohh no” she replied. “If it all goes wrong, this is a list of the people I’m going to come back to haunt”.

-4

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 – IT MANAGED NOT TO RAIN TOO MUCH TODAY.

And that is always a blessing. After a restless night with high winds, trucks again starting up at 04:00 in the morning and diesel horns from locomotives at the level crossing about 2 miles away (you have no idea how far sound can travel in open countryside in the dead of night) I was back on the road (or, at least, the Chemin du Roy) again.

This is the kind of thing that I’m looking for – you can see in front of this house near Portneuf the low wall and flattened surface (the Chemin du Roy was a plank road made of cedar). The bits of gravel close to the camera and farther away behind give the game away a little and it’s nothing like as easy as this to find them normally.

Still, it all keeps me out of mischief, I suppose and it’s quite interesting as I keep on encountering all kinds of unexpected things while I’m on my travels.

Another thing I’ve been looking for is the site of Fort Jacques Cartier. It’s the last place in Nouvelle France that held out against the English.

Strangely enough though, there’s no mention of it anywhere and although I had the co-ordinates (which you can’t reach) there’s not a sign or anything, quite surprising when you consider just how militant Québec is. In fact if I hadn’t seen this bridge and its name, I would have been convinced that I had the co-ordinates totally wrong.

Into the city of Québec and past my beloved Tracel de Cap rouge which I’ve told you about before, and then into the city centre to take some photos that I missed when I was here last time – which you can see on the index page for the Tracel photos.

The Quebec Railway Station was high on my list of places to visit. The outside is magnificent, one of thse typical Nouvelle France fairytale buildings, but the interior is superb as you can see. It’s kept all of its splendour which makes a change, seeing as how normally allof this kind of stuff is swept away in a wave of vandalism as we saw in other places in the swinging 60s.

Strawberry Moose made a few friends in Québec too, but that quickly turned sour when someone called him a toutou. Definitely a moment, that was.

Tomorrow I’m leaving the St Lawrence because I have other fish to fry, and so I’ll head for the hills and an early night. See you all soon.

-7

Monday 2nd September 2013 – AT FIRST, I WROTE …

… “Monday 2nd December” for the title of today’s posting. Not an error, as you might think, but a Freudian slip because it is winter here today. Black skies, lashing down of rain, hurricane force winds (trees uprooted and all that kind of thing in Montreal) – so much so that it wasn’t until 16:30 or thereabouts that I took to the road, all heaters in the Dodge blazing away.

It wasn’t like that at first though. Dawn came early to my little spec on the bluff above the Riviere Ste Anne and it looked as if it might be a lovely day – and I know that the dawn came early because I sa it, having somehow managed to park in the middle of a moquito nest and having been bitten to pieces during the night. I didn’t even cook a meal for fear of disturbing them.

Anyway, as the morning drew on, the day clouded over and as I was fuelling uo the Dodge, the heavens opened and that was that. I found a convenient motorway service area and parked up. With a coffee and an internet connection, I attacked a pile of paperwork and read a book.

By about 16:30 the weather improved a little in the sense that it stopped raining and we just had occasional showers. I hit the road and went off to the village of Deschambault.

This was an important stage on the Chemin du Roy and although the village has altered considerably over the last 275 years, it is said that much of the traces of the original 1734 road are still said to be there if you know where to look.

Judging by the alignment of the church and the presbytery, and the site of the old fort that Champlain had built against the Iroquois (you can see part of the wall as the boundary wall of the cemetery) I reckon that this might be a good-enough bet.

It continues along the headland from here to the new road, but about 400 metres behind me is a sudden stop. Coastal erosion, particularly along the clay cliffs, was always a serious problem and one of the main reasons for some serious alignment of the road.

Another place on the route is a town called Portneuf, about 10kms further along. Someone shored up a river bank and this led to dramatic changes in the action of the river and created a fine port for the goélettes, the little ships that plied up and down the St Lawrence, of which you can see long-since abandoned here. Gradually, the port was expanded until there is now a quay that stretches more than one kilometre into the St Lawrence, and even the biggest ships can tie up here, although not that they ever do these days.

The quay is actually situated right at the apex of one of the sharpest meanders in the whole of the river and there are some delightful optical illusions with a long-range telephoto lens as you capture photos of ships such as the Canadian Shipping Line’s Atlantic Erie fighting the current and the meander and having to make a hard-over turn to port to round the headland without colliding with the quay.

And look at the waves – you can see what I mean about the howling wind and the storm that we were having.

Dusk came pretty quickly after this, which was no surprise, and so finding myself back on Highway 40 I retraced my steps to the Motorway Service Area to batten down the hatches for tonight. I’m not going to be doing anything else.

-2

Saturday 31st August 2013 – I’M NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED …

… last night but I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds at about 18:30 and that was the last thing that I remember until about 07:00 the following morning.

Well, not quite. I had another exciting dream again, which shows you just how comfortable I am inside this Dodge at night. I had exchanged Caliburn for Terry’e van and another car (as if I am ever likely to exchange Caliburn for anything, but never mind). On my way back to work after Friday lunchtime, I parked the van in a narrow alley near to work, a place with high brick walls all around. I decided that I didn’t want to stay here because I’d be stuck in the traffic for leaving, but I couldn’t move the van from its position. Driving out is not the szme angle as reversing in, of course.

Anyway, a nearby truck starting up his motor shattered my reverie otherwise I would still be there now, so calm and peaceful was my little neck of the woods at this transport café that is, would you believe, actually on the central reservation of the motorway.

And after a visit to the cleanest beichstuhl that I have ever seen in a transport café and breakfast of coffee and bagels with strawberry jam and maple syrup I sat down and brought up to date all of my notes and photos in a marathon session

Once I’d organised that, I spent half an hour reading a book – making the most of a quiet morning, and then set off in search of the vestiges of the Chemin du Roy. There are loads of remains of this road, which has been constantly rebuilt over the 300 years of its existence, due to floods, erosion, avalanches, earthquakes, attacks by Iroquois, bridge collapses, fires and the like, some of these vestiges being signposted and some not so and open to speculation.

I’m quite enjoying spotting suggestive-looking earthworks and depressions, and trying to link them up into a consistent route and one day I’m sure that I’ll have the route traced out as much as is possible.
Lunch stop was at Trois Rivières, one of my favourite cities in Canada although far from the nicest of course. I was here at the same time as the Labour Day weekend celebrations and there was a lot going on, circuses, street performers, a local market, and the whole place was heaving with people and was quite exciting.

Not as exciting though as looking at the local police on their new modes of transport. These are called T3 Mobiles, electric powered, with disc brakes and can travel at seppds of up to 30kph – and much better than a pushbike as I was reliably informed because, as you might have guessed, I went up to the coppers and asked them about them. No point in being here and not satisfying your curiosity.

I had a wander around the town in the afternoon and visited a few more bits that I had missed. I’ll have to pad out my Trois Rivieres pages even more now, and that will keep me out of mischief for a while.

As it grew dark I headed for the highway to a transport café that I had seen and I shall dig myself in here for the night. Hopefully not for the morning though – I’ve lots to do.

-6

Friday 30th August 2013 – I’VE HIT THE ROAD, JACQUES

Up early again though and brought all my photos up to date (I wish I could say the same about the notes, though) and having made a couple of trips to the car, it’s now loaded up and Strawberry Moose and I are now comfortably installed inside.

Once we finally managed to leave the car park (which wasn’t easy) we headed off across the city and rhe traffic to go to look at the rapids of Lachine. This GPS that I bought all those years ago is really doing the stuff and I am impressed with that as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin

First stop was however to find some food for lunch for the next few days and so I headed for a convenient supermarket. But never mind the food for a moment, take a look at this car.

It’s a Dodge Saturn, and let me ask you, when did you last see a car as rotten as this on a British road? I have to think long and hard and maybe 30 years ago you might have seen one like this. I don’t even remember any of my tawis being this bad.

The area that we are in, by the way, is clearly an impoverished area of the city judging by just about everything. it’s called Verdun, and the name seems to have been inspired by a group of soldiers returning to Canada after World War I and having witnessed the French city of Verdun after a FRanco-German artillery duel there.

The rapids at Lachine, for all their hype, aren’t all that much to write home about and in a sense are disappointing. But they were certainly much more disappointing to Jacques Cartier who was hoping to find the promised North-West Passage to “La Chine” and the Indies through the St Lawrence and instead came to a shuddering halt at the rapids.

Still it was a nice morning and the walk through the park was very pleasant in the sun so that was something.

After lunch I drove back through the city and along the road that passes by the docks and out to Repentigny where I rejoined my previous quest for the search for the remains of the Chemin du Roy – the old highway of the 17th Century that was built to connect Montreal and Quebec. I managed to do a little work but was interruped by a thunderstorm and driving rain. With that I scuttled to shelter, a motorway service area on the Highway at the back of Lavaltrie, and I’ll be staying here for the night. No point in moving on in this weather.

-2

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: chemin du roy

Monday 2nd December 2024 – I HAVE SEEN …

Friday 22nd November 2024 – AND THERE I WAS …

Monday 6th May 2024 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

Saturday 3rd February 2024 – YOU MIGHT THINK …

Saturday 3rd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

Tuesday 19th September 2017 – HAVING BEEN …

Tuesday 18th August 2015 – LAST DAY IN MONTREAL

Sunday 6th April 2014 – WE’RE UP AGAINST IT NOW!

Thursday 13th March 2014 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER DAY …

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 – IT MANAGED NOT TO RAIN TOO MUCH TODAY.

Monday 2nd September 2013 – AT FIRST, I WROTE …

Saturday 31st August 2013 – I’M NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED …

Friday 30th August 2013 – I’VE HIT THE ROAD, JACQUES

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