This is my spec from last night – the big Tourist Office on the slope down from Cap Tourmente into the Charlevoix. And it was just like home too with a huge hanging cloud hovering over me.
And while parking up at a place like this might be a good idea in theory, it falls down in reality because there is no coffee machine, and that is unthinkable. What kind of welcome is this for tourists?
By the time that I had driven down the hill, through the town of Baie St Paul and up the hill on the other side, the hanging cloud had gone.
There’s a big parking place just along there with a magnificent view of the bay, the interior and also the town, and anyone standing on this point for more than 30 seconds will immediately understand why it is that the Charlevoix is the most beautiful place in the world.
A beautiful drive along the coast brought me to the town of La Malbaie. I came past here on my first journey to Canada but I was in a little hurry and so never stopped. However, today I took the opportunity to stop and go for a wander around.
It’s a really nice town, quite pretty too, and its claim to fame is that it was here that I handed out my first business card to a potential client.
As the mid morning sun cleared away the fog in the river, the views became spectacular. especially across the St Lawrence River.
And there is the distance is the St Lawrence Ferry that crosses between St Simeon and Riviere du Loup. We sailed on that on my first trip here too, smashing through the ice on the way across. But this year, I have another ferry crossing planned.
And I don’t mean this ferry either.
We’ve been on this ferry quite a few times and we are going on it again. It’s the Saguenay Ferry that crosses the mouth of the Saguenay River on the north bank of the St Lawrence at Tadoussac. It’s a symbolic ferry in that the river formerly marked the unofficial dividing line between “civilisation” and the backwoods.
It’s symbolic for other reasons, because look what else I’ve found here.
This is called a T-Rex and it’s a car, believe it or not, made in Quebec. About 50 of these are produced every year and if I lived here in Canada I would be the first in the queue for one of these. And of course, it would have to be called “The White Swan”, for the most obvious of reasons.
And that’s not all of the excitement either. There was a mobile home and caravan on board the ferry and you will notice the number plates. It’s come all of the way from Munich in Germany.
I went over to interrogate the owners and it appears that they have crossed the Atlantic with a company called Seabridge, the vehicle being shipped by Atlantic Containers in a service that runs from Hamburg and a few other places over to Halifax and Montreal.
I shall have to look into this.
This rusting hulk that has come sailing into Les Escoumins is the boat that is taking me over to Trois Pistoles on the south bank of the St Lawrence.
It’s quite an interesting ferry. Tickets are sold in the petrol station in the town, check-in is done by a man who drives up in a car, uses the inside of his hatchback as a desk, and then drives off again afterwards
As for the ship – well, she’s seen better days, and that’s what makes this crossing really interesting. Anyway, I pick up my oar, I’m chained to my seat and off we go.
Just by way of a change, there were all kinds of exciting people on the ferry and I fell in with this American couple from Massachusetts.
Strawberry Moose won some new admirers of course, because he is such a gregarious moose, and the feeling was mutual.
We had a lengthy chat, during the course of which they mentioned that they just driven the Trans-Labrador Highway. They had done the trip in reverse, so they said, which made me think that they must have had a really good pair of rear-view mirrors, because there was no obvious crick in the guy’s neck.
As the sun goes down on the St Lawrence River, Strawberry Moose surveys the scene.
Trois Pistoles is getting closer and closer and night is drawing in, so I won’t have much chance of finding a home fortonight. What I’ll have to do is to drive over the mountains tonight to the other side of Quebec on the New Brunswick frontier and see what presents itself.
I’m full of optimism, so all is well.
This is just a short account of everything that happened today. I took tons of photos and wrote loads of notes, so if you want to see it all, you need to go to this page and follow the account from there.
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by Hammond Egges, then this is the line that they were building all throughout the story, so it has some kind of literary interest.
