…in Godbout, so how am I going to celebrate it?

We can start off by my telling you where I went last night.

I was driving a coach into north London – somewhere around the top end of the Edgeware Road where there was a coach station (which there wasn’t) and after dropping a few people off, I had a panic attack because I needed to go to the south side of the river and for some unaccountable reason I couldn’t remember the way, although it’s a route that I’ve travelled dozens of times. I could only remember bits and pieces of the route.

Strangely enough (or maybe not), now that I’m awake, I’ve gone through the route in my mind. And I find that I can’t now remember it. Furthermore, I can’t remember several routes that I used to use going through London and that’s all rather worrying for me. Not that I’ll ever need them, but it’s certainly a sign of decay.

I say “awake” rather loosely because it was something of a struggle for me to be up and about this morning. But up and about I was, but not for long and I was soon back upstairs.

This was where I had an idea about today’s drive. Remember the other day at Franquelin when I mentioned about the old road and the bridge that I couldn’t reach? I had a look on an internet mapping site and I could see that it might be possible to access the bridge from the other direction.

That sounded like an exciting thing to do, especially as the route would take me past a dam, a waterfall and a hydro-electric installation. That looked like a good plan.

Arriving there, though,wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been. I found the correct dirt track and drove off down it, only to be stopped by another motorist.

Apparently, it’s a private road, owned by a group of people who have a collection of holiday chalets down at the end of the track. I need to present myself to the gate guardian and sign the visitors’ book.

And so I did. It was nominally $7:00 to enter the area but if I was only going to the dam and the hydro-electric installations (and he told me clearly where I had to go) I could go in for nothing. That sounded like a good deal.

The directions that he gave me took me to the barrage where there was a nice little lake and a visitors’ parking area.

This looked as if it would be a good place for me to eat my butty and to read my book for a while in the sunshine. Especially seeing as there’s water here. As you know, I’m Pisces, the fish, and there has to be water wherever I settle down. And with a vehicle, I can pick and choose my lunch stops.


There was some kind of circular tourist walk advertised and while I wasn’t up to spending a couple of hours climbing up and down the kind of route that they were advertising, I thought that nevertheless it would still be a good idea to go for a tramp in the woods.

Unfortunately, the tramp evaded my clutches and so I loitered in the vicinity to admire the vegetation. Mostly all evergreen conifers and not very much in the way of deciduous trees.


And I wasn’t alone here in the forest either.

While I hadn’t seen any livestock of note on my travels, I was continually being overflown by large airliners. It’s that time of day again – early afternoon when all of the flights from Europe come in to Montreal.

Most of them fly along the St Lawrence estuary at round about this time and I must have counted 8 or 9 that went over me while I was walking.


i’d seen on the information panel at the dam that the footpath went past a belvedere – a scenic viewpoint. It was to there that I was heading.

It is indeed a scenic viewpoint and as it overlooks a lake, it has to be quite high in my table of interest. As you know, I’m not a big fan of hydro-electric power – or, at least, those that are powered by lake retention – but I do have to admit that they do make for some quite beautiful scenery in places like this.


I went back to the parking place afterwards and crossed back over the dam.

I was told that this wasn’t actually the original channel of the river but the blocking off of the original course of the river diverted it into a course that was much more amenable to the extraction of the potential power that the river can supply. Power is, of course, the big thing around here for these villages that are isolated from any other source of electricity.

I did mention that round about here were some waterfalls – the Thompson Falls.
I had a good look round and couldn’t see very much but after a while I noticed some water cascading down the rocks over there. I had to look at it for a while before I could make out that it didn’t appear to be actually coming from the dam.

There was nowhere to look at the falls from a better viewpoint and so I couldn’t confirm anything, but this is the best guess that I can make as to the location of the Thompson Falls.


I did mention that I was told that this isn’t the original channel of the rivière Franquelin.

But whatever it was, the hydro work has created this absolutely beautiful river. And you can work out the strength of the river and how deep it floods by looking at the tree line on the shore. Nothing at all is growing within about 20 feet of the level of the river today.I would love to be here in April and see what the river is doing then, when it’s in full spate with the meltwater coming down.

Back in Strider, I retraced my steps for a distance because I’d seen a sign for the snowmobile trail which I knew led to the back of Franquelin and which I’d tried the other day to follow.


It was a pretty rough trail, but then this was the reason that I had bought Strider. He’s a 4×4 pick-up fitted with the off-road kit, larger, heavier wheels and proper off-road tyres, just the thing for roads like this.

And I’m glad that Strider and I took this road because the scenery along here was tremendous. This is the river Franquelin that we had seen from up above at the dam just now.


A short distance further on I came to a grinding halt. The snowmobile trail shot off into the hills and was pretty impassible from this point on. The roadway hadn’t been cleared for years.

But never mind. My attention was diverted by what looked like another small waterfall on the river. This led down to a set of beautiful sandy beaches that you can see over there on the opposite bank. I was eager to investigate.


And so investigate it I did.

It wasn’t all that much of a waterfall as you can see. It wasn’t very high, and there wasn’t very much in the way of the force of water cascading over the falls.

Mind you, it took quite a bit of clambering (and sliding) over a kind of lava bed to arrive at the foot of the falls so I could be proud of that achievement.


And as to why there was so little water cascading over the falls despite the volume of water in the river, that problem quickly resolved itself
from a different viewpoint.

What we have here is yet another hydro-electric generating station. This one dates from 2010 and is actually owned, for the most part, by the municipality of Franquelin who make quite a sum of money from Quebec Hydro for the sale of surplus electricity.


It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and so I went for quite a nice walk along the river to visit the beaches.

the sand, being of ground-down glacial rock, is of a superb quality and was holding its warmth quite well. It was just the kind of place where I could quite happily stretch out for a couple of hours in the summer sun, had it not been for the whining of the hydro-electric generators in the background.


Mind you, I wouldn’t want to stretch out in the sun too close to the sides of the valley, and the reason for that is quite clear when you look at the photograph.

You can see that we’ve had a landslide just here – and it’s a huge one too. I shudder to think how much soil came sliding down the hill when that gave way.

And all of the lumber too. You aren’t going to be too short of winter wood if you were the owner of that piece of land.


By now it was late afternoon and I was feeling the strain. I walked back to Strider along the river and took a photo of the river in the reverse direction,just to show you how nice it was here.

And with that, I was ready to go home – and back to New Brunswick tomorrow too.

And I’d been lucky with the weather. It was absolutely glorious. No complaints from me at all, especially when you consider that we are now into October.

I drove back to Godbout without any incident and that was my day over. I had my tea and went upstairs to pack ready for tomorrow.

I was going back across the river tomorrow and I didn’t really want to leave.