Tag Archives: st lawrence river

Sunday 9th August 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a ship of the day on here?

This time of year we are usually posting one or two every day as we stroll up and down the St Lawrence in Canada. This unfortunately is not the St Lawrence but it’s the best that I can do right now. Right outside the window of tonight’s hotel the River Danube is flowing by and it’s making me quite homesick for the mighty Canadian river.

When I download all of the photos from the camera, edit them and upload them again, you’ll see an enormous cruise ship – a kind of luxury barge – sailing past. Not a 100,000 tonne container ship but it will have to do.

In my really comfortable hotel, the Hotel Minerva in Mosonmagyarovar I had a really good sleep and even though it was Sunday with no alarm, I still awoke at about 05:50.

There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone again. It had been a really busy night

At one point during the night I was somewhere in Eastern Europe in a car, a Sunbeam Alpine convertible. I was driving through the mountains at a really rapid rate of knots but the headlights were set far too high and on main beam you could only see clouds. Dipped beam was set too high as well. I’d been driving around like this doing my best to avoid an accident at night. I suddenly realised that the windscreen was wrong. It was too far sloping back and I was sitting in the wrong position. I organised myself sitting properly and carried on driving. I eventually ended up somewhere where there was a girl. My brother was chatting her up obviously. I had a bit of pastry left so I started making some pastry for a pie and it gradually evolved into a crumble when I added sugar to it although I didn’t actually add any oats. This girl was very interested and came over to talk to me about it. She said “if you have any more interesting recipes let me have them”. I told her that I had dozens, and we had a huge intellectual discussion about my pastry and apple crumble and so on.

Later on, I was away on another voyage but i’ve forgotten half of it. We were .. I’d been out somewhere taxi driving. I had my old Ford Anglia and I dropped some people off in the mountains. I was coming back but I couldn’t get round one of the bends. I had to get out and push the car round. Three guys came to help me so I offered them a lift. They were going all the way to Shavington so I took them there and they booked a taxi for a couple of days time going from Wybunbury to Shavington. I went home and all of the papers were everywhere. My brother and Nerina were going through trying to sort out some kind of system with the paperwork, looking for vehicle records. They had a really good sort through it. I was thinking “I ought to be doing some sorting out while they were doing all of this but I decided in the end that I would start to look at my clothes. I had 2 chests of drawers but I only found 1 drawer with my clothes in it so I wondered where the rest of my things are. I had 2 more chests of drawers somewhere so I went off to have a look through those. While I was doing that there was a young girl, obviously nothing to do with our family having a play around and there were some people admiring some clothes belonging to this girl that were hanging up. I half-expected them to engage me in some kind of conversation but they didn’t. In the end I got on the bus and went to Chester, and walked from Chester towards Wrexham and came to a housing estate of modern terraced houses with a garage on the groud floor, then a first floor and then a second floor. For some unknown reason I thought that this was Brickfield. I was wandering around this estate looking at things and thinking that it would be nice for me to come and live here. Then I heard people talking about how they lived here and the winds and how cold it was so I decided maybe I won’t. I carried on walking a little further but lost all the signposts and I was on a modern 1930s semi-detached type of estate place. I saw a sign for Flint but I thought that i don’t want to go there – i want to head back towards Wrexham so I tried another road. I heard people talking about the Nobel Prize for Literature and how all the people who had entered for this year, and they were saying that if they don’t enter for next year we’ll know that they were just one-hit wonders and not really significant. There was a primus stove and it had been a long time since I’d seen one so I got it and pumped up the pressure and went to try to light it but I couldn’t get the nozzle to work. A guy saw me and came running over the road. It turned out to be his and he was one of these authors. We talked about his live stove thing and he said yes, that he uses it for heat mostly rather than lighting. We had a talk about it aand he went to pump it up, found that it was pumped up and went to light it as well but he couldn’t. he had a kind of Piazzo lighting arrangement where he clicked on the button to light it. I chided him about that. “You really ought to do it with a match”. Someone came along. He had something else and said “you light it with that” but I can’t remember what it was. It turned out that it was all kinds of things like cabbage leaves and so on. I knew exactly what it was and I told him but I can’t remember now. They lit it and started to smoke it and said “yes! This is really good. We had a good chat about that as well.

Going back to sleep, I found myself back in the same dream. So where was I? All the time that this was going on I was thinking that I’d caught the bus to Chester and now I was walking down the road to Wrexham and I’d missed the last bus back by a long time. The only way home for me now was to carry on walking towards Wrexham and then back to Crewe that way. That was going to take me all night at the very least to do all that but I hadn’t even given it any thought about what I was going to do about getting home.

But when I really do get home I’m really going to be having a lot of fun editing all of these photos and transcribing all of the dictaphone notes.

Unfortunately I’m afraid that the days when I could do that during the evening when I arrived at a place of repose are long-since over. Usually now, when I arrive at somewhere for the evening I simply crash out on the bed for an hour or two.

But I digress.

Breakfast was quite nice – not as nice as I had in Lech but nevertheless it was something to be going on with. I didn’t like the coffee but that’s probably more to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand the Hungarian instructions on the coffee machine.

Later on, I headed off for the border in the heat. 09:30 and it was already 31°C. I shudder to think how hot it’s going to be later in the day.

The scenery around this part of Hungary is very flat and monotonous and there wasn’t all that much to see. There were some delightful little Osterreich rural cottages along the way and In the village of Hegyshalom, not far from the Austrian border, there were some splendid examples in the shade of the trees.

The big BMW lets the show down unfortunately. It seems that even in Central Europe the price of a rural cottage is way beyond the means of the average rural-dweller and now the province of the big city-slicker.

But I was surprised at the border. There was all new security fencing with razor wire, a full and complete border patrol and interrogation, and a Romanian lorry being slowly dismantled over on one side.

It reminded me just like the old times pre-1992. Although, interestingly, the old Hungarian border installations from the Cold War days, including the watchtower, were all still there but abandoned, empty and closed up. All of the excitement was on the Austrian side.

This just goes to show you just how much the world has turned round on itself over the last 30 years – something about which I have commented ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS in the past.

Photography is of course not allowed at border crossings but rather unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten to switch off the dashcam in Caliburn. So when I finally get round to editing the video recordings, we can see my border crossing.

A mere cockstride from the border in Austria I came to the village of Zurndorf, where my attention was drawn to this rather impressive war memorial.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a great interest in war memorials in Central and Eastern Europe. The political situation here has varied greatly over the centuries as the Austrian Empire dealt with waves of Muslim invaders, grew to its greatest extent with the annexation of Bosnia in 1908 and then disappeared completely in 1938 with the Anschluss.

Consequently, different regions found themselves fighting different wars as well as quite often being on different sides in the same war, so it’s interesting to see all of this reflected on some of the memorials.

This one unfortunately is quite banal – with just a mention of the two World Wars and nothing about the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or any other conflict in which Austrian troops were involved.

But these monuments in Axis countries are quite different from the monuments in Western countries in a very significant way. In the West, the number of casualties in World War I vastly exceeded the casualties of World War II. But here in Austria, this War memorial shows something quite different as we have seen in many Axis countries.

The upper photo shows the casualties from World War I, and it’s known that the casualty figures of the Central Powers were in a similar region to those of the UK and France. But in World War II when Allied casualties were much less than in the previous war, the caualties of the Axis powers were enormous. The bottom photo shows the casualties from that war, so just compare the two and see what I mean.

There are no dates of death unfortunately, but we have seen on many others that the greater part occurred in the final couple of years of the war. It just goes to show the horrors that were taking place on the Eastern Front in the second half of World War II when the Axis Powers were on the run from the Soviets.

Anyone who denies the overwhelming efforts of the Soviet Union in defeating the Axis Powers unfortunately somewhat misinformed.

In the heat I carried on across Northern Austria. But not too far. Only to the town of Parndorf.

If someone were to ask me whar car I would really like, from anywhere in the world, then if I couldn’t lay my hands on one of Erich Ubelacker’s Tatra 77s, i’d have to go for something like a GAZ M21.

And sure enough, to my surprise, here parked up by the side of the road in Parndorf is a rather sorry-looking M21. Where’s my trailer just when I need it?

GAZ stands, of course for the Gorki Avto Zavod, the Gorki Auto Factory in the Soviet Union, and they were the cars to own if you were anyone in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

Many people have suggested that this was because they were the only car available in the Soviet Union, but that’s doing them a great disservice because they really were a much better car than anyone ever gave them credit with a great many modern features and, unlike cars from the West, were built to last for ever.

One very happy owner of an M21 was the astronaut Yuri Gagarin who often spoke kindly about his car

This particular one is a Series III GAZ M21 Volga – known as the baleen or “whale”. You can tell that by the radiator grille.

They were nominally made from 1962 to 1970 but that’s only half a story. So popular were they with taxi drivers and the like that there was an outcry when the model was withdrawn and a flourishing aftermarket set up where “new” vehicles were assembled from factory spare parts combined with other bits salvaged from scrap yards. I once met someone who had a “new” one that was first registered as late as 1988.

For a short while they were on sale in Belgium, where a diesel conversion was quite popular, but I never found one for sale when I lived there.

So yes, I would bring this one home with me in a heartbeat.

Having satiated my interest for the moment I continued on my way westward.

Not being a fan of big cities when I’m in a hurry, I gave the centre of Vienna a wide berth, even if it is one of my most favourite cities in Europe. But away in the distance I could see it from a suitable vantage point on a low hill to the south so I took a photograph.

It’s a shame though that the photo showed nothing of the city’s magnificence from here. Nothing of the really classical buildings – just more banal late 20th Century high-rise architecture. One of these days whenever its possible to do so, I’m going to catch the overnight train to Vienna and spend a week here.

Through the southern suburbs of Vienna I pushed, and onto St Polten.

For lunch I found a nice shady spot on the edge of a forest and settled down in my comfortable chair in the shade to eat my butties.

I stayed there for a couple of hours too as the heat passed me by. A good book was quite a help, although I ended up drifting away with the fairies at one point.

A little later I picked up the Danube and followed it for a while. And here I ended up in the town of Melk, another place where I would have been happy to spend several hours wandering about had I had the time.

Although the Benedictine Abbey dates from the early years of the 18th Century, it replaced one from the latter part of the 11th Century which in turn replaced a castle owned by Leopold II of Austria. The family of Leopold, the Babenburgs, ruled Austria for another 150 years or so until 1246 and several of the rulers are buried in the Abbey, as is the Irish Saint Colman.

It became a great centre of learning in the Middle Ages and had a magnificent library, although several fires throughout its history have caused irreparable damage to some of the collection. Because of its academic stature, it survived several attempts at dissolution, including the persecution by the Nazis after the Anschluss.

Regular readers of this rubbish will know what this is because you have seen one often enough. There’s ONE SITTING IN THE BACK OF MY WORKSHOP in the Auvergne.

Taking photos of a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle is always a challenge , and I seem to have managed to catch a road sign right in the middle of the photo that obscures half of the car. But what I reckon is that it’s a Traction Avant Lght 7, and with the curly bumpers rather than the straight ones.

And that’s confirmed by the design of the boot lid. Although you can’t see it in this photo, it did indeed have the shape of the spare wheel on the boot lid, being an early model.

For a few miles I followed the Citroen until we crossed over the Danube where he turned right and I turned left.

Having seen the barge on the river – the one that I showed you earlier, I pulled up in a small town further along the river. Behind me up on a hill is the Basilica of Maria Taferl, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Austria where it is said that a couple of local people made a miraculous recovery from serious illness and injury by praying to Mary.

The current church was built in the second half of the 17th Century to replace an earlier one, and It’s said to contain all kinds of important relics and souvenirs left by pilgrims who have come to visit the site over the centuries

Further along the road I stopped off at one point to put some fuel in Caliburn and shortly afterwards my journey brought me into the small town of Au An der Donau where there’s a luxury hotel, the Donauhotel Lettnerhof, on the banks of the Danube. There are some cheaper rooms down in the basement and one of those was available.

No air-conditioning down there but they supplied a portable fan for me and that works fine. There’s also an ice-cream stall on the river bank with a fine selection of vegan sorbets. Banana and coffee went down really well.

So far I’ve had a shower and washed my clothes, which are currently drying on the fan here. I’m off for an early night and hopefully a good sleep. I’m slowly heading homewards, which is a shame. But I have to go home sometime, I suppose. I can’t drift around for ever.

But interestingly, leaving Eastern Europe filled me full of depression. It always used to do that back in the old days and once again when I WENT TO ZATEC a few years ago.

I’m surprised that it still does make me feel like that. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think that I didn’t make the most of my Freedom of Movement and Freedom to Live Anywhere when I had the chance.

It’s too late 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 29th August 2018 – NO PRIZES …

… for guessing where I am when you see this beautiful building, are there?

A place on this morning’s flight from Brussels to Montreal miraculously freed when a passenger was declined boarding due to incorrect paperwork (this new visa system is causing chaos) and so I was bundled aboard.

and you won’t have much more luck than that, will you?

But whose silly idea was it to set the alarm for 05:20 this morning? And for the repeater to go off at 05:30?

And what was even more surprising was that I actually made it out of bed at 05:30 too. I must be improving!

First off was the medication. That’s important. And then to start the packing. It didn’t take long to do that and so a shower and good scrub was next.

Breakfast was the rest of the orange juice from last night, a mug of coffee (having those little tubes of coffee in my travel pouch is really a good idea) and one of those cheese baps that I made last night too.

Taking my leave of the hotel staff I hit the streets to the station and bought my ticket for the airport. There was an announcement that there was a train ready to leave so I made it up onto the platform where there was a Nederlands Spoorwegen train for Den Haag. I’ve never been on a Dutch train before so this was another new experience.

The airport was the usual chaos. I’m booked on a Brussels Airlines flight – SN Brussels Airlines, the successor to the legendary SABENA, or “Such A Bad Experience – Never Again!” and that’s enough to give anyone the collywobbles when flying the Atlantic.

But when I presented myself at the check-in, they denied that there was such a flight. After much binding in the marsh I discovered that it was a code share and the flight was organised by Air Canada.

A big sigh of relief.

At the Air Canada desk there was a long queue. It seems that they weren’t ready for us. So we waited. And waited. And waited.

At least it gave me plenty of time to admire the adverts on the television screen broadcasting to the waiting masses.

I have to admit that I quite liked this advert. The last time that I tried anything similar though, I was asked to leave the shop. It might be the in thing to do in Flanders, but not anywhere else.

It did remind me of the story that I heard about the alcoholic who saw the advert “Drink Canada Dry” – so he’s on his way.

Eventually they opened the gate and we filed in, and then we had to wait again while the staff at check-in discussed last night’s television programmes, applied their make-up, and squirted perfume under their armpits (and I bet that you think that I am joking too).

But we were soon checked in. No aisle seat for me again, which is a shame, no matter how had I pleaded. Some times, I really am a miserable pleader.

After all that I have said in the past, going through security today was surprisingly painless. Just the odd glitch here and there, with the queues controlled by a woman who had clearly been bullied quite severely as a child and was thus determined to wreak her revenge on everyone else.

The automatic passport reader was fun too. With all of the messing about, it would have been far quicker to have checked them by hand. With all of this totally senseless automation, no wonder that there is rampant unemployment in the Western World.

A few years ago I made the point about how at Zurich Airport all of the passengers are directed, once they have gone through all of the formalities, to their gates via the Duty-Free shop.

And with the airport here at Brussels having been substantially modified following the events of 22nd March 2016, this is exactly what happens here these days too.

They never miss an opportunity.

Our aeroplane for the flight is, would you believe – an Airbus A330-300.

One of the earliest twin-engined long-haul jets, this one is one of the earliest examples – c-GFAF, serial number 277, built in 1999 and delivered to Air Canada in 2000.

And never mind Air Transat – we were all crammed in here like sardines too and it was really uncomfortable. Not the seats – they were fine – but the lack of room that we had to stretch out.

They even managed a vegan meal for me, which was most impressive and easily the best that I’ve had on a flight. A chick-pea starter followed by a black bean casserole with rice, and an Alpro soya dessert for pudding.

They weren’t very good with the in-flight drinks though and I have a raging thirst these days. But luckily they had one of these charity things in the airport and were selling bottles of water for €1:00. I had bought two just for this kind of emergency.

Another disappointment was the brat. A child of about 3 just a couple of rows away from me who decided to scream for a couple of hours during the flight. King Herod had the right idea, that’s all that I can say.

It stopped me sleeping, but not so the woman sitting next to me (the wife of the man who had been thrown off, hence I know all about the story). She had a good sleep for a couple of hours during the flight, most of it spent reclining against my arm.

She was lucky though. The non-stop turbulence that we had would have been enough to stop me sleeping, had the brat not obliged.

All of the paperwork requirements for entry have been abolished at the airport. Now you fill it all in on an electronic screen, of which there are about 500 in the arrivals lounge.

I imagined that this would take hours, but our fright was the first transatlantic fight to arrive and we were done in minutes. Even the border police were friendly and helpful.

Has there been a revolution in Canada?

The usual 30-minute wait for the baggage (probably because we were through Immigration so quickly) and then out into the airport.

The price of a three-day transport ticket has increased (to $19:00) and you have to pay $6:00 for an oyster card thing. And there’s a new system for the 747 bus to the town, which now takes three times the personnel and three times the wait, with three times as much confusion.

There was a little group of us, two Septics and a young French guy, having a good chat. Mr Septic was telling some real whoppers (much to the chagrin of Mrs Septic who went to sit elsewhere) so I delighted in telling him some real whoppers in return.

I leapt off the bus at Berri-UQAM into the oppressive, clammy heat and headed round the corner to my hotel. My usual one is booked up but the one next door – the Hotel Elegant – had some rooms (I’d checked on the internet in Brussels and booked one) so I went there instead.

It’s a typical “rue St Herbert” hotel – cheap and basic and seen better days – but it’s central. That’s important. If I’m out at an airport hotel or somewhere and overwhelmed by sleep, I can’t get back to crash out.

A shower to cool me off (and to wash my clothes) and a brief crash out for an hour or so, and a chat to Josée, and I was back out again.

The streets were soaking wet too. I thought that it had looked a bit stormy when I arrived, but while I was deep in the arms of Morpheus just now, we must have got the lot.

First stop was to buy some root beer of course, but on the way to the IGA supermarket, something that I saw (or rather, didn’t see) made me pull up.

I can’t remember what was here now, but whatever it was has now long-gone and they are digging some immense foundations for something else to rise out of the ashes.

Meantime, I’d hate to be living next-door.

Something else cheered me up too;

I think that Poutine is the most disgusting stuff on the planet. It’s chips with grated cheese on top and all smothered in gravy. And how anyone can eat it I really don’t know.

And so the world-famous place in Montreal that advertises “more than 30 types of poutine – and create your own too” has now closed down and is up for sale.

That’s what I call good news.

Even better news is that next door a Lebanese restaurant has opened. And it sells falafel too. So I won’t have to walk far for tea any more.

During all the time that I’ve been wandering up and down Montreal, I’m surprised that I’ve never noticed this building before.

It’s on the corner of the Rue St Hubert and the Rue de la Gauchetière, and it’s formerly the Centre Hospitalier Jacques Viger

If you’re thinking, as I am, that it’s a beautiful building, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s on the Register of Historic Places – not that that counts for much.

On the subject of historic places, just down the road is, in my opinion, the most beautiful building in Montreal.

This is the famous Gare Viger, built as the flagship railway station for Montreal by Canadian Pacific.

All of the passenger trains from further east used to come here, but overnight the Canadian Pacific hacked off its passenger services east of Montreal and abandoned it to the elements.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we regularly visited it in its derelict state, and expressed concerns for its future.

However, no need to worry quite yet. It’s been renovated and is being let as offices.

Several tenants seem to have already moved in and there are signs that more are going to follow.

Where do ships go when they are feeling poorly?

That’s right. They go to the doc(K)s.

And here in Montreal we are lucky in that there are loads of docks to visit down on the St Lawrence.

Not as many as there used to be of course, and regular readers of this rubbish will recall having visited a great many abandoned docks with me in the past.

Not much going on in the ones close to hand unfortunately.

But our old friend Manitoba, moored up in this spot for a couple of years, has gone.

She was moved to Sorel in November last year and he er place has been taken by a very sad and sorry-looking Oakglen – a ship that I am convinced that we’ve seen before but I can’t for the life of me remember when or where.

She’s been here since 1st July and doesn’t look as if she’s going anywhere any time soon.

A bulk carrier of 38,000 tonnes or so, she was built as long ago as 1980 so she probably needs a rest.

That’s all the excitement that there was in the docks, so I just wandered around and admired the view.

It was getting late by now and I wasn’t feeling hungry. I’d made some butties to eat on the aeroplane if I couldn’t get a meal, and so as not to waste them I’d eaten them in the hotel.

But it’s a long time until breakfast so I went into a fast-food place in the rue St Catherine Est. They didn’t have chips so I had a plate of sweet potatoes. And they were quite nice too.

Back here, it was still early, and still hot too. But that didn’t stop me.

I had another shower (the third of the day and isn’t that a record too?) and crashed out on the bed.

That was that.

Monday 26th March 2018 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a Ship of the Day?

We have them every now and then of course but nothing like the ones to which we are accustomed, steaming … “dieseling” – ed … down the Straits of Dover or up the St Lawrence. But today was rather different.

With a huge 300 mm zoom lens and a high vantage point on the Pointe du Roc, a good image editor (Paint Shop Pro has never failed me yet after well over 20 years) and a bit of “crop and paste” I can take photos dozens of miles out into the English Channel and make them look fairly respectable, all things considered.

I’ve no idea who she is and where she’s going, but her silhouette bears a strong resemblance to the Brittany Ferries’ Pont Aven – the ferry that runs between St Malo and Portsmouth. That is of course mere speculation but she’s impressive just the same.

And that’s not the only ship that was out and about.

The rattle and clanking of an ancient Kelvin diesel engine left no-one in any doubt as to who else was just leaving the harbour as I rounded the headland.

It’s our old friend Grima presumably having nipped in last night under cover of darkness while I was flaked out on the sofa.

There was quite a crowd up here on the city walls watching her leave port. French people of course, but judging by their accents not from around here.

They were making all kinds of remarks and speculations about who or what she might be so I was able to fill them in on the details. They may be none-the-wiser, but they are certainly better-informed right now.

But never mind ships for now – during the night I was on the strangest rail journey. Rattling down the long corridor of this double-deck train furnished with cheap red and white plastic seats and trim until we suddenly came to the carriage with the swimming pool in it. The only way past was to shoot down this hole underneath the pool in which you were propelled by compressed air, and it was full of water. Definitely not the stuff for claustrophobics. So I queried it with the two Japanese attendants who at first didn’t (or wouldn’t) hear me but eventually they understood what I meant and “ohh yes, that’s the only way”. “But it’s wet!” I replied. “So where’s your towel?” they asked. When I explained that I didn’t have one they immediately offered to lend me one, with a weary sigh as if they were totally fed up with people who come on their trains and don’t bring their own towels. And I still wasn’t convinced about this escape route. I come out in a cold sweat even when the word “submarine is mentioned and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I once declined the opportunity to visit the interior of the aforementioned.

But this all began with a visit that I had made to Stoke on Trent with someone whom I know to go to pick up something from the car spares place. It was crowded and I eventually fought my way to the front of the queue. The three little Chinese girls standing next to me were after a car part as they couldn’t go to school until they had this piece. “Let me guess – it’s a Mercedes” I said, recalling a similar occasion that had occurred to me. Of course, it was, so I leaned across to my friend, told him the story and invited him to guess. He didn’t hear me so I went across to him – and found that I had lost my place in the queue. So back again and worked my way round, and eventually I was seen. I had to go outside for my part where the person dealing with me told me that the measurements were wrong. It wasn’t 84m but he could find something at 80mm. I reckoned that it was more like 84mm but he insisted on 80mm and it was the centre boss from a Ford Escort steering wheel. The one he had was dirty so he started to clean it up but this had already taken far longer than I had planned and I had things to do, so I took it as it was, explaining to my friend (by now joined by none other than Zero) that I would see him later – although I knew that I wouldn’t really have time. My route away took me to the hospital and I ended up in a ward where I had once stayed. It was crowded with people sleeping everywhere and in the corner were people doing relaxation exercises, pretending to be rabbits asleep. Something that I found quite amusing. My route out of here took me past all of the nurses whom had dealt with me, and they all kept on asking me if I had my permit to leave. I explained that I hadn’t even been in, but they of course asked me why I was here then. And it was during one of these encounters that I ended up on board this train.

And no wonder that I was exhausted after all of that. Quite a struggle to leave my bed when the alarm went off.

And for a change I managed the medication and a breakfast, followed by a shower and even a lap round of the washing machine. High time that I organised myself.

Once everything was up and running and the medication had done its stuff I headed out for the shops. And it was an expensive day too for in three of the shops I spent €25:00 each, and that’s not like me.

In LIDL the money went on a kitchen roll holder and a set of kitchen knives (which are rubbish – worse than the one that they are supposed to replace), some absolutely delicious strawberries (I remembered that I had half a can of spray-on vegan cream left from Christmas) and a punnet of kiwis. Yes, with my new sorbet maker, I’m not going to be short of desserts for the next week or so.

NOZ was having another sale of exotic drinks plus a DVD sale with some good stuff in there, and also a nice black fleece. I realise that I don’t have enough jumpers and fleeces are good because they dry quickly when you wash them or it rains. And this one has the pockets sewn that they make little inside pockets too, which are very handy for travelling.

And a rolling pin! I’ve finally found a traditional wooden rolling pin too. Been looking for one for ages.

LeClerc was just the usual stuff but a lot of it because I’d let the supplies run right down just recently. And just €2:50 in Centrakor, on a new measuring jug. I had something of an accident the other day with the previous one.

Of course today was just the kind of day to take your butties to the wall outside and sit thereupon, so I had some soup to finish off, didn’t I? And then I had my walk and my little guitar practice session.

The postie came meantime and bought me the first consignment of my order from the other day. With having no credit card I wasn’t able to treat myself to a birthday present but once I’d organised that last time that I was in Brussels I could go ahead and order some of this year’s wish list. We had the remote control that I mentioned, and a couple of DVDs. More is yet to come.

Tea was a burger and vegetables, and the usual evening walk.

Liz was on line later on so we chatted for ages. Dylan, her grandson, has just passed his flute exam (bravo Dylan) and Robyn, her grand-daughter, has just passed her first level ballet exam.

So I’ve ordered a command performance ballet when they come in the summer, Dylan on music and Robyn on the dance floor

What more can anyone require?

Thursday 21st September 2017 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish might recognise this bridge, because we’ve seen it before.

Back in 2010 in fact when we were on our way to Montreal and then Labrador.

It’s called the Thousand Islands Bridge, because there are a whole load of islands, maybe even a thousand, in the St Lawrence River just around here.

Back then, we saw the bridge from the Great Satan side of the river and you may well be surprised to learn that today, I am once more on the Great Satan side.

And it took all of my self control and restraint to do it too.

This morning I was up some time after the alarm went off and had a few things to do – such as a shower and to have breakfast, and to catch up on yesterday’s paperwork.

By 08:00 I was on my way, exactly as planned – something that surprised even me. I was decanted straight into the morning rush hour, but then that was only to be expected. While it is always a disappointment to be held up like this, I had made due allowance.

Once I’d cleared the rush-hour traffic, which took 50 minutes to clear 10 kilometres, I was able to bowl along quite rapidly.

Flying down Highway 40 I went past several villages that I had previously not noticed.

So which one of these is your favourite village? St Zotique? St Polycarpe? Or St Telesphore? They don’t half have some weird names for some of the villages in Quebec.

But there again, Quebec is a very strange place, as you might already have discovered.

It’s about 350 kilometres from where I was staying to Kingston in Ontario.

And despite having stopped for fuel and a coffee, and taking a little detour around the old canal on the edge of town I was in Kingston for just after 12:00.

That was well in advance of my appointment and so I was able to go for a little walk around the town – and make a decision that it’s one of those places that I will have to come back to visit when I have more time.

And here is Sandra, making the acquaintance of Strawberry Moose.

And while that was going on, let me tell you a story.

My Great Grandfather was a soldier who served in the Wiltshire Regiment in India and South Africa and fought in the Boer War. But some time in the early years of the 20th Century he and his family emigrated to Canada and lived in Montreal.

He enlisted in World War I despite being well over age, and presumably died of wounds because his body is in the Military Cemetery at Mount Royal under a military headstone, despite not dying until the early 1920s.

His wife hated Canada, the cold, and all of that and so as soon as her husband was buried, she was on the next boat back to London.

They had several kids and the youngest kids, one of whom was my grandmother, returned to the UK with their mother.

A couple of the older children were by this time married and they remained behind with their own families. And when I was looking into the military history of my great grandfather I came across Sandra, who is the grand-daughter of one of the older children who remained in Canada.

And so she’s my cousin at several times removed.

As you know, this may well be the last time that I shall be in North America, and I’ve been doing all of the things that I’ve been meaning to do.

Meeting up with Sandra was high on my list, and so here we were, in Kingston, having lunch together and swapping family histories.

After lunch I headed off to Great Satan. And we had the usual border confrontation with a rude, ignorant security guard, who demanded to know what I was laughing at.

They really must trawl the Government Services to find the most unpleasant civil servants, and put them in these immigration booths

However, the guy in the office was quite pleasant and polite, and here I am.

But why am I here? You might well ask.

As I said just now, there are several tasks that I want to perform and several people whom I want to see before I go back to Europe – one person in particular whom I haven’t seen since 2005.

So here I am in the Rodeway Motel on the edge of Syracuse in New York State, conveniently placed on the side of Interstate 81.

From here, Strider, Strawberry Moose and I have about 1,000 miles to go and it’s going to take a couple of days to get there because I’m not able to go as fast as I used to.

It will give him enough time to head for the hills, otherwise he might be getting a surprise visit in two or three days time.

Wednesday 20th September 2017 – HAVING HAD …

… a good night’s sleep in yonder motel last night, it was time to hit the road.

First stop was my little lock-up at Jarry. There, I liberated my electric kettle (coffee is now on the menu in motels) and a few books. I didn’t liberate the slow cooker because I have the one that I bought in Fredericton on my first day out.

And a good plan that was too. Since I’ve been on the road I’ve yet to pay for an evening meal or a breakfast, except on a ferry or in company.

Another thing that I did was to throw away the insulation. I bought a pile of that to insulate the truck cap when I was sleeping in it, but seeing as I no longer do that, it was just in the way, sliding over everywhere and stopping me accessing the things that I needed.

And so that’s gone the Way of the West.

Giving Strider a good clean-out (and putting all but 5 litres of fuel out of the cans into his tank) took me until lunch-time, would you believe.

And so I headed off down to the riverside, to a little park that I know hidden away in the docks.

It was a beautiful afternoon too and there were crowds of people, including an old couple from Massachusetts who had decided to park diagonally across two parking spaces and who received a piece of my mind.

I found a free table and made my butties for lunch.

and my ship truly came in while I was there tucking into the vegan cheese, tomato and lettuce rolls.

Or, rather, my ship truly went out, for here is the John J Carrick heading off downriver.

She’s not a “ship” as such but an oil tank barge with a deadweight of 11800 tonnes. She seems to spend most of her life on the St lawrence not going very far.

Much better luck with this one though. She’s the Toronto Express and she’s parked up in the container terminal next door.

She’s much more like a ship, with e deadweight of 56000 tonnes.

She seems to operate on some kind of circular route, calling at Southampton, Antwerp and Hamburg, and then back to Montreal. And probably knows the way there all by herself too.

Next stop was the Motel, and here we had a calamity. I mean to stay tonight in the Motel La Marquise in the rue Sherbrooke Est in Montreal. It’s a reasonable price for a big city, with free parking and right next door to the Langelier Metro station. All of that is very important.

And so I arrive and … no trace of my booking. Even showing the receptionist the confirmation doesn’t convince her.

But then se notices something, and draws my attention to it. It seems that there’s a motel of exactly that name in Sherbrooke, about 90 minutes away, and Brain of Britain seems to have in error booked himself in there.

I’m not going all that way, I can tell you, so I cancel that booking there and book myself in over the counter here – quite a mistake because the walk-in price is considerably different from the advance booking price.
ques
Josée rang me when her meeting finished, so I hopped next door into the Metro, bought a ticket, and headed out to Snowdon.

We had a coffee and a chat and then went to that Indian restaurant that I know for a meal. The food is really beautiful there and Josée enjoyed it as much as I did.

Josée took me to a bar that she knew in the rue St Catherine – the Foufounes Électriques. It’s one of these rock music bars and apparently one of the “in” places in the city.

And don’t jut take my word for it – the décor is something else here, including that which is on offer in the gentlemen’s rest room.

We watched the football – Montreal Impact were busily beating Toronto 5-3 and, to be quite honest, it was appalling. I’ve made a few derogatory remarks about Major League Soccer in the past and nothing that I saw tonight will change my opinion

And so I came home. I was going to do some work but I gave up and had an early night instead. It’s all beginning to tell on me.

Monday 18th September 2017 – WELL THAT WAS …

… something of a wash-out.

I’d come to Quebec mainly to do some research at the University of Laval, but I abandoned round by lunchtime.

I was going to say that I’d had a good night’s sleep but I’d had a very bad attack of cramp in the night – I’ve been having a few of these again just recently.

So a nice early start with coffee and porridge made in the microwave, and then a pile of paperwork to prepare things. And then I hit the road.

Reaching the University was one thing – finding where I was going was something else. I ended up going up a one way street the wrong way – twice! And through a red traffic light too.

Parking is weird there too – you either pay for an hour or for a day. There’s no in-between., and it isn’t cheap either. I can’t help feeling that there’s someone making an awful lot of money out of parking fees.

In the reception, a couple of helpful people at reception pointed me on my way to the library, and there, a very helpful lady helped me find what I needed – none of this incestuous academia like at Cambridge a few years ago.

Why I was here was in respect of a researcher by the name of Thomas Edward Lee.

An author by the name of James Enterline had written a book in the early 70s with a well-thought-out but very flaky argument about the Norse presence in Ungava Bay in the north of Quebec.

He had quoted Lee as one of his sources, but Lee’s works weren’t in the mainstream. The Centre of Nordic Studies at the University of Laval had funded his research and I had discovered that they till held his thesis.

And so I came here to read it.

And, as I said, it was a disappointment.

Lee, being aware of Enterline’s arguments, succeeds in undermining, if not demolishing them. But his own excavations at Pomiok Island are disappointing.

He’s sure that he has found a Norse Longhouse here, but his conclusions are based on coincidence rather than any hard discovery. The only substantial artefact – a Norse iron axe-head – wasn’t discovered by him but handed to him by an Inuit who had apparently found it many years earlier. And so its provenance could not even be verified.

The net result of all of Lee’s labours that he incited a great deal of discussion amongst his peers, and his funding was stopped.

I wasn’t impressed by his confrontational and polemic style of dialogue either. It struck me as being most un-Academic.

As a result, I decided to abandon my research, thinking that he couldn’t really tell me anything concrete about the Norse presence in Ungava.

At the end of the day, it was difficult to decide how much of Lee’s funding issues had been due to the inconclusive nature of his discoveries, how much was due to the un-academic manner of presentation, and how much was due to the confrontational, polemic style of his debate with his peers

Lunch was next on the agenda and so I removed myself to the Parc des Braves.

I had a list of things that needed doing on the north shore of the St Lawrence – a list that has been current since 2013 – and so I decided to attack that.

Especially as the Parc des Braves was included thereupon. I’m not sure how I had managed to miss that out before.

If, like me, you were educated in the 1960s you would have received the same kind of Empire-building jingo that I had had.

And we were taught that the UK always won, and came through every test with flying colours.

And the magnificent victory on the Plains of Abraham that General Wolfe had had, which had won French North America for the British crown.

I was even in “Wolfe” House in my primary school.

But that is, unfortunately, far from the truth.

It’s certainly true that the British had beaten the French at Quebec and occupied the city, but the fighting was far from over.

A French relief force had set out from Montreal and engaged the British in Battle at Saint-Foy, right where we are standing – and defeated them soundly.

The British retreated behind the walls of the Citadel of Quebec and the siege was on.

And had it been a French fleet that had been the first to break through the ice on the St Lawrence in the following Spring to reach the city, not a British one, the History of Quebec would have been very, very different.

And, of course, we were taught nothing about this at school as it didn’t fit in with the image of the Powerful All-Mighty UK (or “England” as we were taught then).

One thing left to do – and that was to go to find the Ursuline Convent – something else that I had spectacularly overlooked when I was here last.

Finding a parking space was, as usual, the issue in Old Quebec, but we soon come across more of this religious hypocrisy here.

We’ve seen so much of this on our travels – not just in North America – and you’re all probably very tired of me drawing your attention to it.

But whatever happened to the Forgiveness of Sins, or of Turning The Other Cheek, or Giving All That Thou Hast To The Poor.

There’s nothing whatever in the Bible about the towing away of offenders.

The Ursulaines – three of them – came over here in the 1èth Century to give instruction and education to the girls of the city – in the same way that Marguerite Bourgeoys did in Montreal round about the same time.

And the education part is still continuing, as you can tell, because I seem to have arrived round about chucking-out time and there are brats everywhere.

And you can tell what kind of school it is simply by looking at the clothes worn by the girls.

It’s the fashion in North America for exclusive private schools to dress their girls in plaid. And the more plaid, the more exclusive the school.

Here, they are wearing full-length plaid smocks. You don’t get more exclusive than this.

And the mothers picking up their daughters in their expensive Porsche Carreras is another sign of exclusivity too.

Somehow, you get the feeling that here at the Ursuline Convent and the Ursuline School, the message of Jesus Christ has has become extremely distorted.

I bet that Mother Marie of the Incarnation, the original founder of the Institution here in Quebec, is turning in her grave.

When I was here for my mega-ramble in 2012, this particular Square was fenced off and undergoing a great deal of renovation.

I was therefore extremely curious to see what had become of it and so I directed myself here.

And I wasn’t disappointed. They seem to have made a very fine job of it and I was quite impressed. I like the laurels particularly – and the fountain.

On the way back to my motel I stopped off at a “Maxi” Supermarket for some soya milk. And ended up with a few other things too, including Spruce Beer and also some grapes at 89 cents a pound – which didn’t last long.

Back here, another couple was moving in next door and they took quite a liking to Strawberry Moose.

But here’s a thing.

When was the last time that I crashed out? I mean – seriously?

It all caught up with me yesterday afternoon. I started to yawn at about 16:30 and that’s all that I remember until 21:00 when I found myself fully-dressed under the bedclothes with the internet radio blaring away. I was gone for good by the looks of things.

It took me a while to come round, but I still managed to make tea – and then I was gone again.

Mind you, I’m not surprised that it’s caught me up. I’ve been going at quite a pace just recently and something had to give.

Sunday 17th September 2017 – THAT WASN’T …

… a very successful night at all.

Nothing wrong with the room or with the bed – but there’s a light aluminium porch thing over the door to the room and the force of the torrential downpour that started at about 03:00 and cascading onto the porch put paid to any thoughts that I might have had about sleeping.

But I must have been asleep at some time because I was away on my travels again during the night. We were back with the cars again during the night, and back where we were a while ago with three cars all of which should not have been on the road for one reason or other. One of them was my green Vanden Plas 1300 with its collapsed floor, but worse than that, when you switched on the wipers and the lights, it took five minutes for them to warm up before they would work. And so I set out one evening in the driving rain, switched on the lights and wipers and, as usual, nothing happened. But the rain was teeming down so fast I couldn’t see, so I was obliged to stop at the side of the road. And with no lights, this was an extremely dangerous thing to do. It put the wind up me so much that once we were on our way I rolled it down the hill into town and left it there, and walked back to tell everyone what I had done. It hit me only then that leaving the car there with no tax, people are bound to notice it and if I go down to retrieve my possessions later, someone is likely to call the police to say that I’m stealing things, and this is all going to become very uncomfortable.

I was out of the motel fairly promptly and down the road in the direction of Forestville.

The road down to the shore was closed for repair and so a diversion was posted.

And thanks to the diversion I discovered much more about the town. There were parts of the town that I certainly didn’t know existed – such as the church which I hadn’t seen before.

It’s a much bigger town than I ever thought before.

But here I had a disappointment.

There’s a ferry across the St Lawrence from here to Rimouski and it’s one that I haven’t taken before. But I won’t be able to take it today.

Today is the day that it changes schedule from three crossings per day instead of two, and the 11:30 crossing was cancelled. Next sailing is at 17:30 and I have far too much to do to wait around.

Instead, I went to the supermarket which was open for some more salad stuff and the like – stocks are running low here.

Next stop on the road was at Les Escoumins.

I’ve driven through here on several occasions but I’ve never actually stopped for a look around. And this was something that I was hoping to put right today.

And so instead of the new main road, I took the older road that runs into town.

Despite the miserable, depressing wet weather, I went out to the headland at the mouth of the river.

The cross that is there is quite significant. It relates to an event that took place in the early 17th Century when the earliest Christian missionaries arrived here amongst the Innu.

They found that a cross had already been erected on this spot. How it had come to be here was a mystery.

It is known that Jacques Cartier, on his voyages here in the 16th Century, erected crosses wherever he landed on the shore, but there was no record of his having placed one here.

From where we had parked there was an excellent view across the bay to the town.

Or, at least, there would have been had the weather not been so gruesome.

But thinking on, I’d been lucky with the weather up to date. I can only remember one other day of miserable weather when I’ve been on my travels – that day in Western Newfoundland.

On the western edge of the town, the road has been realigned too.

You can see where the modern alignment goes, off up there to the right. The older alignment is over there to the left.

And I remember that we have been up there on one occasion and took a photograph of the view back down here. And the weather was much better then too.

There was just one more place to visit, and that was out at the back of town.

There’s a waterfall here and that’s quite attractive, but back in the olden days there was a mill here that made use of the water power.

The river is an important salmon river and so there was a salmon ladder and all that kind of thing here but since the mill has gone, so has everything else.

The river has reverted to its natural state.

No prizes for guessing where I am now.

I didn’t get my ferry crossing across the St Lawrence earlier, and so that means that I get the ferry crossing across the entrance to the Saguenay Fjord.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have crossed over on this ferry on several previous occasions.

And so we all pile aboard and await the signal to be off. The ship that we are sailing on is the Jos Deschenes.

Owned by the Quebec government, she was named after a Montreal taxi-driver who refused to accept a couple of English-speaking tourists and made them walk to the airport.

For this major act of defiance, he was honoured by the Quebec authorities.

You are probably wondering why there isn’t a bridge across here these days, seeing that bridges have been erected almost everywhere else.

The fact is that the fjord is an important shipping lane and if you were with us in April 2012 as we drove up the fjord, you would have seen the sizeof the ships that go up there

And the site here is so constrained that it’s not possible for any bridge built here to have sufficient clearance for the larger ships to pass underneath.

I’m running incredibly late for my lunch. It’s well after 14:00 now in fact.

I’m heading for the docks at St Simeon – that’s my preferred lunch stop today. And as I round one of the bends in the road, I can see it over there.

And unless I’m very much mistaken, the weather seems to be clearing. If I’m not careful, I might even find the rain stopping in a moment.

We’ve been here a few times, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall. We’ve even stayed here a few times in the past.

There’s a beautiful quayside here with an excellent view of the town and it’s just the ideal place for me to sit and eat my butties.

I was right about the weather. The rain has eased off, but there’s still a roaring wind and there’s quite a rough sea running.

Talking of seas, when was the last time that we had a Ship of the Day? Goose Bay and the Fairlane if I remember correctly.

But today, steaming … “dieseling” – ed …down the St Lawrence towards the open sea we have an ideal candidate.

She’s too far out for me to read the name, which is a pity, but with the telephoto lens I can pull out a really good shot of her as she goes by.

On the way back round again I take a diversion off Highway 138 to go to visit the sleepy little village of Port au Persil.

I’d passed briefly through here on one of my many trips through the Charlevoix but I’d never actually stopped for a look around.

This was another one of the things that I wanted to put right today, even though the weather was not on my side.

While I was walking around the old harbour, I fell in with a couple of English people who had come here in a hire car from Toronto. We had a little chat while I admired the view of the little harbour.

I was right about the view of the place too. It’s a really pretty little village even in the miserable weather.

And I was lucky that the photos actually came out so well given the conditions. They could have been much worse than this.

By the time that I’d done the lap around the back of the Charlevoix, the weather had improved dramatically.

My first stop was at Baie St Paul, because, as regular readers of this rubbish might recall, we’d come here last time and witnessed a large building burning to the ground.

I was keen to see what had happened to the site.

In actual fact, the site has been cleared and a huge hotel complex, the Hotel Le Germain, has been built on the site.

It’s an incredibly upmarket hotel by the looks of things – you can tell this from the noise that the hotel makes about its “free parking” – as if that’s something of a novelty.

Which it probably is in a hotel of this style.

And by the looks of things, the Charlevoix tourist train makes a call here too.

I’m actually looking for the sea – or rather river-front.

I’ve never actually made it to here and that’s another thing that I wanted to do, because I have a special reason for being here

But first, we can sit here and admire the beautiful day, because the weather has now changed dramatically and I’m in shirt sleeves now.

And this is the reason why I’m here.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here in April 2012 we had seen an abandoned goelette beached here.

We’d tried to reach it back then, but we were confounded by a high tide and a running river.

But this year, I’ve timed my arrival correctly and found another was across the dunes and the river.

And it looks as if my efforts are only just in time. Because there’s not all that much of her left.

Even in the five and a half years since I was here last, she’s taken some battering and there’s not all that much of her left.

Goelettes were small but very sturdy sailing cargo ships (although this one seems to have been motorised) and carried out the coastal trade along the St Lawrence.

The road network is comparatively recent in eastern Quebec and the only way to move about back in those days was by sea.

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of these goelettes going up and down the river from port to port delivering goods and transporting people, but today there wan’t behalf a dozen left.

Climbing over Cap Tourmente towards Quebec there’s the most incredible view behind me of a hanging cloud hovering over the valley where Baie St Paul is situated.

There’s too much traffic for me to leave the vehicle to photograph it, but by judicious use if the hard shoulder and the rear-view mirror I do the best that I can.

And I’m quite pleased about how this has turned out.

Just one more photograph before we arrive in Quebec City.

It’s quite out of focus and distorted but it was taken though the windscreen of a moving Strider of an object moving towards up in wicked light.

But it’s really quite an exciting photograph because it’s a diesel multiple-unit heading towards us on the Charlevoix Tourist Line.

So what’s happening here then? This isn’t what I was expecting to see at all.

Due to the loss of light and confusion at the road works, I’m at the wrong motel in Quebec.

This is the first one that I ever visited and where the story about Quebec showers comes from.

Nothing has changed either, and we even have the same landlady. But she’s done me an excellent price for the two nights that I’m staying here and there’s a fridge and a microwave in the room.

What with one thing and another, I’ve not yet bought an evening meal since I’ve been on the road. With the slow cooker for when there’s no microwave, I’ve been self-catering for all the time that I’ve been here.

And isn’t that a pleasant change?

Tuesday 12th September 2017 – I’M IN GOOSE …

… Bay right now, and this bed-and-breakfast is far too posh for me. Even the spare toilet rolls in the bathroom have little hats on.

But then I shouldn’t even be here. I should have been staying somewhere else but according to mine host here, the guy whom I’m looking for is “out of town” and that’s a huge disappointment.

It means that yet another one of my projects has tombé à l’eau, as they say back home in France.

Last night, I had another disturbed night’s sleep – maybe crashing out for an hour or two in the afternoon yesterday didn’t help. But it took ages to go off to sleep, and I was tossing and turning all night.

But I was on my travels too. Back running my business and it was a Saturday morning, really quiet, and so I wandered away. I ended up at a house ful of people who were visiting someone who was quite ill.People were being let in to see this person two at a time, and there was a lot of noise coming from that room. Eventually it was my turn, and found that the sick person was another former friend of mine. She had a puppy with her – apparently her cat had died. She wasn’t interested in talking much about anything serious – just chatting about nothing. I asked her why her house was surrounded by scaffolding and she gave me a weird look. The other person there said that the house was a wreck and falling down, and this was apparent, although the house wasn’t as bad as the one next door.
Somewhere along the line I was in my bedroom when I noticed a young rat in there. That filled me with dismay.

After breakfast, I set out to tidy up my living accommodation, and that took me longer than i intended too.

And then I had to take it all out and load it into Strider. Luckily I’d tidied him out the other dayso that didn’t take too long.

I could also take a photo of the caravan too. Expensive, but it was the only thing available and I was quite comfortable in there.

And so I went to cash up, and it wasn’t quite as painful as I was expecting. But then again, to do things like this you need to bite the bullet.

It also gave me an opportunity for Strawberry Moose and me to say goodbye to our crew.

Nothing had been too much trouble for them. I was made very welcome and I’ll be delighted to go back and carry out a further exploration.

The road into Cartwright the other day was beautiful and well-worth a photograph. But with it being late afternoon, I had the sun in my eyes to the west.

Not so this morning though. I have the sun at my back and the view is even better.

That’s Main Tickle over there again, I reckon.

Somewhere down there, I reckon, is Muddy Bay where the orphanage was.

It’s impossible, apparently, to go there by road and so we were obliged to go by boat the other day.

But the weather was nothing like as good as it is today and so the photography wasn’t as good as it might have been,
and that was disappointing.

At a certain point the Métis Trail goes over the brown of a hill and just for a brief moment there’s a view in the distance of what I reckon might be Paradise River.

You can see why Cartwright gave it its name, can’t you?

This new zoom lens that I have bought is doing really well and while it’s not as sharp as I like, it’s producing the goods fair enough.

Cartwright wasn’t clearly the only one who considered it to be Paradise.

It looks as if a native Canadian has chosen this spot for his homestead and, honestly, who can blame him?

It’s the kind of place where most of us would like to settle if we have the chance – and I’ll show you my preferred spot in due course.

This is one of the places where we always stop to take a photograph as we drive by – it’s where the Métis Trail rejoins the Labrador Coastal Drive.

It’s the first place where Labrador City appears on the signs – only 813 kilometres away – and it’s only another 500 or so kilometres from there to the North Shore of the St Lawrence and Highway 138.

And I’m not going to be there for a good while yet.

Although this is one of my favourite spots on the Labrador Coastal Drive, this isn’t my ideal place – at least, from a personal point of view.

But with a stretch of 414 kilometres without fuel and any kind of facilities whatsoever, this would be the ideal spot for a couple of fuel pumps, a small motel, a little food shop and coffee bar.

But of course they won’t let me in live permanently in Canada, will they?

Around here on the dirt road the speed limit is 70kph. And although I was doing … err … about 70 kph I was passed by a lorry as if I were standing still.

A few kilometres further on, there he was on the side of the road, receiving the care and attention of the local Highway Enforcement Office, a member of which was busily writing out a ticket.

It’s the first time EVER that I’ve seen Highway Enforcement out here, and if anything is a sign that times, they are a’changing, then this is it.

Somewhere hidden in those trees is another sign of the times – a Highway Labour Camp.

And they need it too because the road – bad when it was new in 2010 – was even worse in 2014, worse still in 2015 and absolutely disgraceful this year.

They can’t let it disintegrate much more than this, surely?

One of the main arguments put forward about the veracity of the Norse sagas of Vinland concerns the cattle.

The Norse are said to have brought cattle with them, and how they had them grazing in the meadows. This is dismissed as fantasy by the critics.

But there certainly are peri-Arctic meadows in this region – dozens of them in fact, and from what I have seen there are more and more of them developing as the forests are cleared, whether by fire or other means.

Another thing that there are plenty of are eskers. These are like sand ridges and stretch for miles.

But they aren’t brought by rivers but by glaciers. The stones caught up in the glaciers rub against each other and are slowly reduced to sand.

When the glaciers recede, the sand is dumped along where the edges of the glaciers would have been, and they are spectacular where roads have been cut through them.

I mentioned earlier where my ideal spot in Labrador would be.

If I could settle here, I would be extremely happy. But also extremely isolated too because it’s miles from anywhere.

Situated at N52° 52′ 30″ and W58° 19’52” in fact.

You can see what I mean about these peri-Arctic meadows. They are all over the place these days.

And assuming that the climate was kinder in the 11th Century – in the middle of the “Medieval Warm” period, there would have been many more too.

Bringing cattle here would not have been any problem whatever, especially if the cattle had been used to life in Greenland.

There’s another enormous work camp here at the side of the road.

We’re currently up on the Eagle Plateau and so it’s called, rather imaginatively, “Eagle Camp”.

I thought at first that it was something to do with Highway maintenance, but closer inspection revealed that it’s all “Valard” – the company that is constructing the electricity transmission cables across Labrador.

Mind you, the highway DOES need attention. It was resurfaced with loose gravel in 2015 and it’s already been ripped to pieces.

At one point I hit a hidden dip, the rear end of Strider lifted off the road and I was going sideways heading for the drop off the verge.

We had an exciting couple of seconds (which seemed like a couple of hours) as I wrestled for control of the vehicle. But we are still here.

I mean – you can see what the labrador Coastal Drive looks like simply by glancing in the rear-view mirror of Strider.

At this point we have loose gravel being thrown about everywhere and clouds – and I do mean clouds – of dust thrown up behind us.

No wonder that you spend so much time fighting for traction if you are thrown off course by the lumps and potholes.

But at least it’s not like the time in the Utah Desert where the trail was so rough that I was travelling slowly and the wind was so strong and in the wrong direction that I had the unnerving experience of being overtaken by my own dust-cloud.

But oh! Wait a minute! Look at this!

When we were here in 2015 we noticed that the asphalting of the highway had started – but had come to a sudden stop with patches of gravel road in between.

But now, the asphalting has extended far beyond where it was back then. There’s the sign telling you to prepare for the gravel road, and there’s the guy cleaning off the edges of the road.

Another 5 years and it will be asphalt all the way.

But despite how good the road might be, there are still challenges to face, such as the incessant climbs and descents.

We’re travelling from south-east to north-west and all of the river valleys around here are going from south-west to north-east.

You can see over there the line on the right – that’s the road back up the other side of this valley. On the left is the track of the Valard cable from Muskrat Falls.

But here is the final descent for now. That’s the valley of the Churchill River, and to the right are the towns of Happy Valley and Goose Bay.

That’s not quite my destination for tonight though – I’m driving on to North-West River where I have things to do.

But I’ll leave you here to admire the beautiful scenery.

But a little further on is the entrance to the controversial Muskrat Falls hydro-electric project.

And opposite is the camp of the protestors. Not quite as big as the Faslane camp, but it’s limited by law, and here all the same.

I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the project, because everyone has his or her own opinion about it, but it’s one of these things where, from my own point of view, the environmental and cultural objections outweigh the profit considerations.

But then again, as I keep on saying, I don’t have to live here

But leaving aside Muskrat Falls for the moment, I clatter across the metal bridge over the Churchill River.

It’s been known by several other names, such as the Grand River (which it certainly is) and the Hamilton River, but it was renamed the “Churchill” upon the death of Sir Winston.

But whatever name it might have, it’s certainly the most famous river in the whole of Labrador,and probably the most important too.

As usual these days, arriving in Happy Valley, I find a different dirt road heading east and follow it all the way that I can.

And on this particular road, I can’t go any further. But it certainly brings me to a spectacular view over Goose bay and the head of the Hamilton Inlet.

It’s very easy to picture the scene as the first European explorers – maybe Louis Fornel the fur trader or maybe John Davis of the Davis Straits – or maybe even the Norse explorers – made landfall here.

But hats off to this guy here at Birch Lane Farm. It’s not everyone who would attempt commercial farming in a place like this.

But he seems to have plenty of crops and a good growth of hay, so it looks as if he can make a good go of it.

It totally undermines the opinions that people have about the “Frozen North” – just as it did when I saw the shipping container marked “Alaskan Agriculture”.

A quick call in to the port here at Terrington Basin in Goose Bay to see who’s about.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a “Ship of the Day” and we strike it lucky here. We have the heavy load carrier Fairlane who left Shanghai on 12th July and came here via the Suez Canal.

That’s a long way to come for any ship and it makes me wonder what it was that she was bringing in.

At North West River we hit a temporary setback. My contact isn’t answering his telephone so that rules out my accommodation and my project for tomorrow, which is a disaster.

Not only that, the B&B in the town is fully-booked up.

The motel has a room, but it requires me to drive all the way back to Goose Bay to pick up the key as the unit here is unstaffed. And the girl at reception is particularly unhelpful.

So badger that for a gale of soldiers. A quick telephone call (thanks, Josée for the ‘phone) conjures up a bed in a B&B in Happy Valley, at a price rather less than the motel. I can do that so I cancel the motel room.

But it’s frightfully posh in here – way out of my league. The spare toilet rolls in the bathroom have hats on.

I’m more used to the kind of place where you can “spit on the deck and call the cat a b@$t@rd” as you know, but beggars can’t be choosers, not by any stretch of the imagination

At least I can use the microwave here, so it’s beans, sausages and spuds for tea. And then an early night.

I’m whacked!

Friday 26th May 2017 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we featured a proper “Ship of the Day” on these pages?

When I was in Montreal or somewhere down the St Lawrence we could take our pick of dozens each day, but it’s usually pretty thin pickings whenever we are elsewhere.

But not today though, because today our ship really has come in.

It’s another really high tide this week and it’s brought in the Victress, who has sailed in from Southampton to pick up a load of gravel. Built in 1992, she flies the flag of Barbados and displaces about 1500 tonnes.

Not the biggest ship we’ve seen, but the biggest that we’ve seen in recent times and the biggest that we are likely to see here in Granville. She’s not there now, though – the ground’s all flat. And she’s somewhere out in the Channel so it seems. And I’ve not been able to find out where she’s heading.

She was formerly known as Uranus but this was changed due to ribald remarks from captains of other ships – something along the line of “with my binoculars I can see Uranus from here”

After breakfast this morning I had a quick shower and shave and change of clothes and hit the streets in search of the bus stop. Of course I have a choice of two, and of course it was “the other one” but just €1:00 and pretty painlessly (and I’ll do this again) I was decanted at the top of town to rescue Caliburn. He’s had his service, and the strange noise seems to have gone, and he’s had his controle technique. That gives me two years motoring without any major worries, which is always a bonus.

And on the way back, I picked up my oven. That’s now installed and working – and I had to change round my kitchen a little to fit it on the shelves and things don’t fit as well as they did before, which is a shame. But tomorrow I’ll be tracking down a pizza tray, some bread-making stuff and some oven chips. THis is going to start to become interesting.

For lunch I headed off to my usual spot – the clifftop overlooking the port – and this was where I made the acquaintance of Victress. But not for too long because once more I was burnt out of my position and head to retreat to here where I promptly crashed out for an hour.

And while we’re on the subject of photographs … "well, one of you is" – ed … it occurs to me that you have yet to see the view out of my living room windows.

It’s not very inspiring unfortunately (although I’ve seen much worse) but if I look over to the right-hand side I can in fact see the sea.

It’s not exactly the sea view that I was hoping to have, and I don’t have a terrace which would have been perfect, but here in Granville I can’t do much better than this. Especially as if I just step outside the front door of the building the view is stupendous as you know

Later on, I went out to Roncey. Liz’s grandchildren (whom you have seen many times on these pages) are coming to stay tomorrow and it’s important that Strawberry Moose is there to greet them. So now he’s playing hide-and-seek down the bed.

Back here, I had another dollop of the kidney bean stuff that I made yesterday and it was just as delicious too.

So tomorrow it’s a mega-shop again. So just you watch me forget something important.

Wednesday 1st March 2017 – THE TROUBLE …

… with having had a really decent sleep during the day is that during the night it’s very difficult to drop off again. And so it was last night. Took me absolute ages.

But having said that, once I’d gone I’d gone, and until about 06:00 too. I had a quick look at the time, and turned over back sleep again until the alarm went off.

Breakfast here is at 07:30 but I still managed to haul myself out of bed early (no cacophony to accompany me, for which I am grateful) and stuck myself under the shower to liven myself up.

First down to breakfast (although I was almost immediately joined by others) and fruit salad, bread roll, orange juice and coffee. One thing about the breakfasts here, leaving aside the choice and the amounts on offer, is that everything is so fresh and tastes delicious.

And so it ought to be, given the price that one has to pay to stay in here. Of course, I’m not paying anything like the price indicated on the door, being stuck in my tiny little room in the garrett, but I’m not complaining for a moment.

What I was complaining about though was the internet. Sometime during the night it had crashed and they hadn’t been able to fix it. That left me hanging out on a limb for a while as I have so much to do here.

By 09:00 nothing had happened and so I decided to go for a walk along the promenade. It was grey and miserable, quite windy too, and there weren’t many people about.

We mentioned yesterday the story about the redevelopment of the promenade. Here, we have yet another old building from the Belle Epoch that has bitten the dust. It wasn’t as spectacular as the Villa Maritza, but there you go.

In fact by now, most of my old haunts from my spells in Oostende in the 1970s and early 80s have disappeared. All of the cheap hotels that used to be here have been swept away and replaced by blocks of holiday flats. One cheap hotel that I’d noted when I was here in 2013 had gone by the time that I came back here last November.

Not that it’s particularly relevant to this particular part of the discussion , but here’s a view of the corner of the promenade that I took this morning.

You can see another Belle Epoch villa here today, hemmed in by the more modern blocks of flats, and I wonder how long it will be before it’s gone too.

But there’s an exhibition of photos along the promenade showing us how Oostende looked 70 years ago just after the end of World War II and I noticed this photograph on display. It was taken from almost exactly the same spot as my photograph, and you can see how the corner looked back then, and compare the difference.

You might have noticed in the previous photograph the orange object on the promenade. There are actually about a dozen of them and they clearly have some kind of significance, although whatever it might be has so far escaped me completely.

It’s not exactly what I would call “artistic” but then what do I know? My idea of a sculpture is the column and statues to the right, a war memorial to the natives of the area who lost their lives at sea. It’s a shame that its site has to be cluttered up with these modern … errr … items.

I told you yesterday about the fish market here in Oostende. That’s it there, the white building with the blue wavy roof. I went for a look inside but there were only two stalls open and the choice of fish available wasn’t overwhelming. Not really worth photographing.

I reckon that the dock behind it was the old fish dock, but it’s used these days by the Police and the Customs authorities – people like that. It’s where their boats are anchored, or moored, or tied up.

When I was here in 2014 I stumbled across a ferry that I hadn’t noticed before, in all the years that I’ve been coming to the town. The deep-water port goes deep into the town and there isn’t a pedestrian way across the entrance. It’s a long walk around to the other side.

That’s the reason for the ferry, anyway.It’s only a small ferry, with room for 50 seats on board, and I took a photograph of it from the far side of the port entrance, with the town in the background. And also with the old ramps from the days when there was a ferry service across to the UK.

It’s always a bad idea for me to see a ferry, because I end up in a bad mood. In fact whenever I see a ferry it makes me cross. Especially when it’s a free ferry, and today is no exception. It always brings out the sailor in me.

Of course, that’s the reason why I was able to take a photograph from the other side of the port entrance – I’d piled on aboard the boat. As indeed you might expect.

You’ll notice by the way the booths on top of the quay to the right. It was some kind of market day going on up there.

It’s been months and months since we’ve had a real “Ship of the Day”, but you can’t go sailing across a port (even if it’s nothing like as busy as it was 50 years ago) without encountering a ship or two.

We’re in luck today, because here we have the Simon Stevin, registered in … errr … Luxembourg. Just imagine sailing this ship up the Moselle. She displaces 35,000 tonnes and was built in 2010.

She is actually a pipelaying vessel, and that will explain her presence here. With the expansion of the wind farm out on Thornton Bank, they will be needing extra cables laid to the shore.

The Simon Stevin would be the ideal vessel to be involved in a task like this.

The Simon Stevin isn’t the only big ship in the port either. We also have the Willem de Vlamingh in here too, and she’s likewise registered in Luxembourg.

She is your actual cable-layer and was built in 2011, displacing 6800 tonnes.

So here we are – some of the benefits that the wind farm has brought to the town of Oostende

As if that wasn’t enough, the harbour pilot boat was setting out of the docks and heading out to sea.

The entrance to the port is somewhat complicated and so a harbour pilot is necessary for certain boats that want to enter here. And so it looks as if there’s one of those standing offshore needing help to come in.

I couldn’t see anything hanging around outside, and nothing had come in by the time that I had left. I’ll have to go round later on this afternoon or maybe early tomorrow morning to see if anyone else has come in to join the party.

We saw in an earlier photograph – the one that I had taken of the Promenade in the 1940s – all of the fortifications that covered the shoreline of this part of the world. All of them built by the Germans in World War II

There are still plenty of them left, dotted all over the coast and we have seen plenty of them in the past. The eastern side of the entrance canal to the deepwater port is still littered with them even today and in all of the time that I’d been coming to Oostende I’d never actually been for a wander around them – until today, that it.

The port of Oostende had been a German submarine base in World War I and had been the subject of what was the precursor of the later commando raids of World War II. Not only that, the beaches here would make an ideal landing for the Allied armies coming to liberate Europe in 1944, what with the major port of Antwerp only just down the road.

Hence the German were quite nervous about the coastline around here and had used labour from the prison camps to construct these massive fortifications, as well as many others of all different types which have long-since disappeared.

What many people don’t realise though, because it was another one of these wartime secrets that wasn’t put into the Public Domain until the great release of wartime records in 1994, was that the Allies knew absolutely everything that there was to know about the Atlantic Wall, and they didn’t even need to send someone to look at it.

The company that had contracted to build it was a Belgian company, from the rue des Atrebates in Brussels. But what the Germans didn’t realise what that the company was actually owned by a Russian emigré called Leopold Trepper. And he had a part-time employment as a spy for the Soviet Union, leading a group called the Rote Kapelle or Red Orchestra

It was one of the greatest triumphs of espionage in World War II but because it was a Soviet triumph, it never received the acclaim that it deserved.

But the work was done thoroughly, and the vestiges are very difficult to remove. We’ve seen when we were in France a few years ago that one of the gun emplacements near the Atlantic Wall suffered a direct hit from a blockbuster bomb, and all that it did was to tilt the concrete.

That’s why many of these places are still here. Explosives are really the only way to remove them and it’s far too dangerous to destroy them in a congested area.

The Atlantic Wall isn’t the only set of fortifications here at Oostende. We have another exciting pile of stuff buried in the sand dunes.

Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to go over to it. It was all fenced off and I couldn’t find an obvious point of entry, and so I can’t tell you exactly what it is.

I shall have to make further inquiries.

We saw the new harbour wall when we were here in November. We walked the whole length of the other side of it in order to have a good look at what they had built, and I was tempted to go for a walk down this side of the harbour wall today, but the weather was conspiring against me.

There were some people out there trying to walk down there, but they weren’t having a great deal of success.

And you might be wandering what that bow of a ship is doing set up on a plinth out there

A closer inspection reveals that it certainly is part of the bow of a ship, and the colour gives you a clue – that it might be something to do with the Royal Navy.

It is in fact part of the bow of HMS Vindictive, a cruiser that has a very important claim to fame in the history of Oostende.

The British were concerned about the U-boats operating out of the port after its capture by the Germans during World War I, and so they launched two raids on the harbour, sinking ships in the entrance canal to the docks.

HMS Vindictive was one of those that was sunk here, in the raid on 10 May 1918, and when it was cut up for scrap, the bow section was preserved as a monument.

The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and we have thousands of photographs going back to 1970 of ships sailing up and down here.

As ships have grown larger and larger, there are fewer and fewer of them, but the size means that you can see them easier even when they are away on the horizon, especially if you have a 305mm zoom lens.

I’ve no idea what kind of ship that this might be, but it’s certainly a big one and it seems to have an on-deck cargo. There’s plenty of accommodation on there too, so I’ve no idea what it might be. I know that there’s a car transporter that takes passengers with it and sails from Hamburg to South America, but that is probably not it.

No prizes for guessing what this ship might be. The initials of the owner – MSC- painted on the sides gives the clue away, because we have seen dozens of these in the past sailing up the St Lawrence River on the way to Quebec and Montreal.

It’s a container ship of course, and a huge one at that. And it’s empty too. And that’s a symptom of the world’s reliance on China for its manufacturing industry and that the world has nothing to send back in return.

We saw all of this with Japan in the 1970s and how it led to the collapse of manufacturing industry in the UK. Now, the rest of the world is suffering, and this is the Brave New World into which the Brexiters have plunged their country, with no colonies and noallies to back them up.

With the telephoto lens still on the camera, I could take a photograph all the way down the beach in the direction of Zeebrugge. But you can’t see much down there because of the wind whipping up the sand all the way down the beach.

We were brave, those of us out there, but at least I had done what I had intended to do, which was to have a good visit of this part of Oostende. It’s hard to think that I’ve never been out here, in all the years that I have been visiting the town.

Now I can head back to civilisation.

Parked up at a wharf near the ferry is a sailing ship, the Nele.

You might think that she is an ancient ship but she was built as recently as … errr …2005, but to a design of a traditional Oostende masted sailing ship.

It’s possible to go off for a mini-cruise on board and I did admit that I found the idea somewhat tempting. But I imagine without any doubt that I’ll be back here some time or other, and so I can make further enquiries.

I’ve not quite finished yet over here.

We’ve seen the wind farm out there on Thornton Bank. That’s about 30 kms offshore and in order to bring the power onshore they have a huge submarine cable.

Outside their offices they had a couple of metres of cable on display, and so I went over to take a photograph of it. It’s interesting because NALCOR in Labrador have laid a cable under the Strait of Belle Isle and are planning another one under the Gulf of St Lawrence to Cape Breton, so I was curious to see what a submarine cable looks like.

It will be of interest to the Brits too. Having sold their electricity-generating capacity to the French, one of these will be laid across the Channel sooner or later to run British electricity across to France in the same way that the Compagnie Lyonnais des Eaux runs British water from Kent across to Northern France through the pipeline in the Channel Tunnel in times of drought.

Back on the other side of the canal I went to the Delhaize to buy some stuff for lunch. They had grapes on offer too so that was today’s fruit issue resolved, wasn’t it? And back here, I crashed out for an hour as soon as I got in, which meant that I was rather late for my butty.

This afternoon I had a few things to do, and then went out for a walk. And here I encountered yet more of Belgium’s world-famous customer service. I went into a café for a coffee, and sat and waited for a waiter.

And waited.

Eventually, a waiter appeared, and cleared a few empty tables – and then disappeared. Eventually, he came back and I ordered a black coffee.

And waited

And waited.

Eventually I picked up my coat and left, heading for the café next door. I’d beens een by the waiter, placed my order and had it put on the table in front of me long before the other waiter in the other café had brought me the one that I had ordered.

I came back to the hotel for a warm, and then wandered off for tea. I know a nice Italian restaurant here that is cheap but good value, and they served me up a delicious penne all’arrabbiata, nice, hot and spicy.

So I’m going to try for an early night, and see how I am, and how the weather is, tomorrow. I hope that it’s a nice day and that I’m feeling up to some exciting moments.

Thursday 24th November 2016 – YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN …

… the stuff about Bouillon that I put on line this morning.

You won’t have seen this photograph though.

It’s really something special, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Belgium, or maybe in Ireland or in Quebec. No restaurant anywhere else in the world would advertise “non-stop cooking” and then go on to inform us that it is closed on Tuesdays.

It was Wednesday too when I was there, remember, and it looked pretty closed to me then.

despite being whacked last night, it took me quite a good while to drop off to sleep last night. But when I was asleep I really was asleep and remember nothing at all.

I do however remember being on my travels though – I was making a film about something or other starring a girl. And while the content might have been inappropriate for audiences in the USA, there was nothing at all that would prevent it from being broadcast in Europe and most other places in the world. However I was having a great deal of trouble convincing the Americans to let me continue with the project.

When the alarm went off I had a huge struggle to leave the bed. But I was second down to breakfast and before the breakfast room was open too.

Later, back in my room, I had a little … errr … relax and then cracked on with Bouillon. Once that was on line, I cracked on with whatever I was doing about Labrador. I went outside for the bread that I bought yesterday and that was about that.

And I’ve made a remarkable discovery – a large document listing all of the ferry operations on the St Lawrence River and the Gulf of St Lawrence for the last 75 years or so. This is a magnificent find to be sure. I can get lost … "we wish you would" – ed … for years in this.

As well as this, I’ve also finally found a downloadable version of the diaries of George Cartwright – the man who opened up Sandwich Bay in Labrador during the period 1770-1785 and who named most of the geographical features in the area.

All in all, a good day.

Mind you, I have crashed out for an hour or so this afternoon after my butties and it was hard to recover from that. Yesterday’s exertions and the difficult night really got to me.

So now, having done some more research, I’m off to bed to catch up with my sleep.

But I’m beginning to have a major quandary.

The web pages that I’m working on were originally meant to be about my return to the Trans-Labrador Highway in 2014 and in 2015 with a little research to give some background information to where I’ve been.

What’s happening now is that I’m unearthing all kinds of gems that have been lost to history for ages and deliberately “overlooked” by modern politicians and commentators. I’m even amazed to discover that one of my pet “ideas” is far from new, having been proposed as far back as 1966 and deftly swept under the carpet on the grounds of cost, only to be trundled out 50 years later as a “new, revolutionary idea”.

And things like an established ferry company that was refused a licence to operate a boat because of a 25-year time limit (its ferry was 27 years old), and replaced by a new company whose ship was … err … 30 years old and is still going now, aged 46.

There’s tons of stuff like this.

Yes, looks like I’m going to be heading towards yet another major controversy with these pages, and this time on an international stage too.

Still, it keeps me out of mischief.

Sunday 23rd October 2016 – IT’S SUNDAY!

And so in consequence I have had a day where I have done badger all of any importance.

Despite the lateness of the night and the fact that I had to leave my comfortable bed once during the night, I had a really good, deep sleep. I’d been on my travels too but as soon as I awoke, everything was wiped immediately from my mind and I remember nothing of it.

And I’ll tell you just how organised I was today – the alarms went off at 07:00 and 07:15 as usual, I was in the kitchen having breakfast by 07:30 and by 08:15 I was back in my room, having during that 45-minute window been out to the boulangerie for my Sunday baguette.

I’ve been sort-of-ish working on my website today. Nothing like as intensely as during the last few days. Following my visit to the north shore of the St Lawrence estuary a few weeks ago, I’ve been updating some of the pages as you know. This page is the one on which I’m working right now, and it will be expanded to two or three pages just as the one that I was working on the last couple of days (and which I mentioned yesterday) was expanded.

But as I say, I’ve not put my heart in it today. I had a little doze, had a chat to Liz, read some stuff on the internet and generally wasted some time.

But it’s not as if I’m worried. It’s Sunday, and I’m allowed to have a day off. I did manage to make it to the pizza place around the corner – after all, Sunday night is pizza night isn’t it?

So tomorrow, if I don’t have a phone call from the people who are doing Caliburn’s wheel bearing, I’ll carry on with the web pages.

Sunday 9th October 2016 – AND SO THIS IS IT!

My last day in Canada on this trip. And for all I know, my last day ever in Canada. The way my health is going, I shall be hard-pushed to make it back.

But just for a change just recently, I had a good night’s sleep! In bed reasonably early, and out like a light. One trip down the corridor but apart from that it was totally painless until the alarm went off at 06:00. Didn’t feel a thing! My efforts of the last few days have worn me out as you know, and so a good sleep was an essential.

I was rather late for breakfast though and there was quite a crowd. But coffee, orange juice and bagels soon had me up and about.

It was a nicer day today too – some blue sky was out there for a change. With it being my last day, and with my flight not leaving until 22:00 I decided to take advantage of the weather to out and about, to say goodbye to the St Lawrence River. Accordingly, I had a little doze for a while, stuck my suitcase in the “left luggage” and then hit the road at 11:00, just in time to leap on board the bus 202 that was going past.

At the Ducollege Metro Station, I made a decision. I’ve been going one at a time to the different Metro Stations at the end of each line to see what was going on, but I’ve never actually been to the end of the line down from past DuCollege.

That Metro Station is the Cote-Vertu and so I headed off there. And this is a photo of the interior of the station, just to prove that I made it here. And you can even see a train down there at the bottom.

Here’s a photo of the exterior too. It’s situated on the corner of the Boulevard de la Cote Vertu and the Boulevard Decarie. The building is the one over there at mid-height on the left margin of the image.

And really, I should have come here ages and ages ago. It semms to be occupied by the Indian community and there’s a couple of very democratic Indian restaurants there, as well as a pizzeria and a falafel place too. I can quite easily find a place to eat here.

There are lots of other shops too, including a wholesale fruit and veg place that sold me a pound of delicious grapes at just $0:99.

Yes, I missed out here at the Cote Vertu.

Down one of the streets off the Boulevard Decarie I noticed a church, and so I went off down there to look at it.

It’s actually the Church of St Laurent, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise seeing as we are actually in the Borough of St Laurent. The church was built in the 1830s, although the facade was not added unti 50 years later.

It’s not the first church on the site. There was one dating from the 1730s and which was significant in being the first church on the island to be built outside the traditional city limits.

The buildings next door to it were even more impressive than the church. This is the Vanier College and is significant in that it’s one of the very few English-language colleges in Quebec, having opened its doors in 1970.

As for the name, that relates to Georges-Phinéas Vanier, who was one of the very few Canadian-born Governor-Generals, and served from 1959 until 1967, much to the chagrin of the Quebecois extremists.

Prior to the college being here, this was the site of the Couvent Notre-Dame-des-Anges – the Convent of Our Lady of the Angels, run by the Soeurs de Sainte-Croix – the Sisters of the Holy Cross – from whom the land was bought.

There was also a women’s college, the Collège Basile-Moreau, on the site. He was, by the way, the founder of the Order of the Holy Cross.

On the way back to the Boulevard Decarie, I stumbled upon a Charity Shop that was actually open. And here I had an enormous stroke of luck.

I’ve written loads of stuff about abandoned railways and the like, mostly from analysis because there seems to be nothing at all in the way of historical research into Canadian railways. It’s not like the UK, where every inch of old railway is faithfully reported and its history thoroughly researched.

But here sitting on the shelves of the Charity Shop was a book entitled Canadian National Railways – Towards the Invitable Volume 2 1896-1922. It’s long out of print but it covers almost all of the lines in which I have an interest, including the ephemeral railway line to Centreville about which I’ve been barking completely up the wrong tree.

And $3:50? You must be joking!

My perambulations brought me all of a sudden to the DuCollege Metro Station. I realised that despite all of the trips that I have made from here, I’ve never actually taken a photo of the exterior of the building.

This is the time to put this right, even though it’s the other entrance that I habitually use. And while I was taking this photo from the park across the road, I was being smiled at by a couple of these religious people with their portable news stand handing out the literature.

I’d never actually looked down the end of the side-street in daylight either, and I’d been wondering why the street was called “DuCollege”. And I dealt with both of those issues while I was here.

There was this beautiful stone building right down the end of the street so I strolled off down there to inspect it. It’s the CEGEP ST Laurent. The Collège d’Enseignement Général et Professionnel is, I suppose, one level below the University system in the same sense that the old Polytechnics were in the UK – that kind of thing

Although some of the education services here date back almost 175 years, the college came into being in 1967 when the CEGEP system was founded. It goes without saying that it is French-speaking.

As for the church next to the CEGEP St Laurent, well, shame as it is to say it, there I was busy taking a photograph of it – after all, it really is beautiful – and then off I wandered back down the street towards the DuCollege Metro Station having forgotten to make a note of its name.

Anyway, it’s actually situated in the Avenue Sainte Croix, although I do realise that this piece of information isn’t going to help anyone very much.

Back at the Metro station, I hopped on board a train and headed into town. Just as far as the Victoria-OACI station, and then walked up the hill towards the Place d’Armes.

As I walked into the Place d’Armes through the crowds, this interesting vehicle pulled up across the square so that the passengers on board could look at the Cathedral and the statue of Paul Cholmedy, the Sieur de Maisonneuve.

It seems to be another one of these amphibious vehicles of the same type that we saw years ago in Halifax and probably does the same job. I can imagine that there’s some kind of factory somewhere in Canada churning out these machines for the tourism industry.

There’s a “Subway” further on down the street and that’s where I was heading. I’ve been wandering around for quite some time and it’s way past lunchtime. My stomach thinks that my throat has been cut.

Down at the docks, we’re in luck. Last day of our journey and we are able to conjure up a “Ship of the Day”.

She’s the Venture, a self-discharging bulk carrier of 30,000 tonnes and built in 2002. She arrived here after some considerable perambulation in the Mediterranean.

The flag that she is flying, and which I didn’t recognise at first, is the flag of the Marshall Islands, a group of islands (one of which is the legendary “Bikini Atoll” of nuclear-testing fame) in the Pacific and said by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to be “by far the most contaminated place in the world”.

Another claim to fame of the islands is that it probably has more ships than it has inhabitants – a fact probably not unconnected with the islands’ rate of corporation tax of just 3%.

By now the clouds were starting to close in from the south, but the rain was holding off and so I went for a walk along one of the quays.

There must be something up somewhere concerning maritime traffic on the St Lawrence because there was this tug steaming … "dieseling" – ed … up the river. I hadn’t noticed any ship in the vicinity other than the Venture and she didn’t look as if she was preparing for sea, so I wondered where the tug might be going.

Over there on the other side of the dock is the quay where we saw that goelette when I was here in early September. It’s not there now (the ground’s all flat, and beneath it lies the bloke …) though.

In the background over there is the Ile Sainte Hélène and the Biosphere, which was the pavilion of the United States during Expo ’67. It was originally covered by an acrylic sheath but it will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this rubbish to learn that this sheath was destroyed in a fire in May 1976.

From my spec on the dock I walked around the quay onto the waterfront. There were hordes of people here, all taking advantage of the afternoon and what sun was still loitering about.

But never mind the people for the moment. What was interesting me was the autumn colours on the trees here in the Vieux Port. They are magnificent. You can see why I love being here in Canada in the autumn – I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

A little further on along, there was a good view down towards the east past the clock tower. This is a war memorial to the sailors of the Merchant Marine who were lost during World War I and was designed as a replica of Big Ben in London.

Further down is the Pont Jacques Cartier – the Jacques Cartier Bridge that spans the river between Montreal and Longueuil, with the modern port area further along behind.

The weather was now deteriorating rapidly as you can tell from the clouds. Scattering a cloud of pigeons, I walked around the docks to the old commercial port.

We’ve talked about the goelettes – the ships that used to run the boat services from Montreal to all of the small towns and villages along the shores of the St Lawrence in the days before the road network.

This was the dock from which they sailed and to which they returned. And all around here back in those days was a kind of market where the people from along the shore who had brought their produce down in the goelettes would set up their stalls to sell their produce.

Feeling the strain again by now I repaired to the old Marché Bonaventure. This has now been restored and occupied by all of these trendy boutiques. But down at the far end is a café where there are some comfy chairs and, surprisingly, coffee on sale at a very democratic price.

A comfy sofa was free so I installed myself there, drank my coffee and read my new book for a while. When I find my strength again, I can move on.
About half an hour or so later I hit the road again, retracing my steps to the Place Victoria and the Metro Station.

Right outside, but across the road from the entrance, I stumbled across a television crew filming someone talking into the microphone about something or other. I’ve no idea who he was and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I took the opportunity to take a photo of him.

I always seem to find a camera crew when I’m on my travels in North America, don’t I?

The metro took me back to DuCollege and there I had to wait ages for the bus 202 to take me back to the Comfort Inn. We had the usual unavoidable performance of persuading the driver to drop me off by the bridge at the end of the Cote de Liesse where I could cross the motorway (otherwise I have to walk for miles and miles because there’s no official bus stop anywhere near there).

There was an airport shuttle already on the road so I grabbed my suitcase, nipped into the Gentlemen’s rest room, and then back outside for the shuttle and on the way to the airport.

In the shuttle were a couple of people and we ended up discussing the Brexit. Even though many Quebecois have been fighting tooth-and-nail for 50 years for independence, the unanimous opinion of my fellow-travellers was that the British vote for the Brexit was the most stupid thing that they have ever heard.

Quebec has an almost-inexhaustible supply of raw materials and an almost-inexhaustible supply of energy. The UK has no raw materials and all of its energy resources are owned by foreigners (even the new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point is to be operated by EDF of France).

It has nothing that anyone would ever want and nothing that would be any use in launching a manufacturing industry.

There was quite a queue at the baggage check-in and I had to wait for about half an hour to hand in my suitcase. And this time, they managed not to drop my passport into the conveyor belt.

The food on Air Transat is total rubbish as I have already told you, and there is a “Subway” downstairs. Consequently, I went off and ordered a 12-inch vegetarian without cheese. Just for once, I asked for the bread to be toasted, and I’m wishing now that I hadn’t, for reasons that I will explain in due course.

The final thing that needed to be done concerned my bus ticket. I had bought a three-day one, as you might remember, and there was over 28 hours remaining on it. I intended to give it to anyone who was about to buy one but although I was there for 10 minutes there was no-one approaching the ticket machine.

What I did therefore was to write on it “valable jusqu’a mardi minuit” – “doesn’t expire until Tuesday at midnight” and left it on the machine. Whoever might need it can just help themselves.

The queue through the security was quite small – about 10 minutes to go through. And much to my surprise, not only was it painless but the staff weren’t the usual arrogant unpleasant staff that you normally find at the airport at Montreal.

I hiked off down to the gate, which was right down at the end of the terminal, and installed myself on a seat where there was a power point (and that took some finding too). Feeling hungry, I attacked my Subway sandwich but half of the filling fell out. Having the bread toasted meant that it wasn’t as pliable and so I won’t be doing that again.

At 21:15 we were called onto the aeroplane. it was an Airbus 330, quite new by the looks of things, and I was lucky in having one of the twin seats near the rear.

Once we had all settled in, we hurtled down the runway and launched ourselves off into the air, heading back to Europe. My stay in Canada was over.

I was desolate – this may well have been my last trip across the Atlantic because I won’t ever be in any better health than I am right now. Who knows where I’ll be in 12 months time? “Pushing up the daisies” I mused to myself.

And here you are – 2658 words of my last day in North America. A world-record number of words.

I hope that you all appreciate it. Don’t forget to “like” it

Tuesday 4th October 2016 – I’M BACK …

… in New Brunswick tonight.

And I’m not sure if that is disappointing or not. I wanted to stay in Godbout, that’s for sure. But I also wanted to head off. I was having itchy feet and needed to feel the road again.

Last night though was bizarre. I thought that I had had a very disturbed night but when I sat down and analysed it, it wasn’t quite like that at all. I was late going off to sleep and, just for a change, I’d managed to close everything down, and I’d only been off down the corridor once. When the alarm went off too, I was stark out, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

But I had been on my travels though. Caliburn had an electric fault and the cigarette lighter socket was no longer functioning. So I took him to someone’s house where there was an old man whom I thought could help me. I had to reverse him all the way down the drive at the side of the house (it was a bungalow) into a wooden shed that was there. I knocked on the door and the guy’s son (he reminded me of the son of Labbe -the farmer who uses the field behind my house) came to the door. I asked him if his father was there and he replied that he was, but that he was asleep in bed. His sister (of the son, that is) came to the door and climbed into Caliburn. I drove her into town because it was market day. We walked around the market together and after we were half-way around the circuit she asked me if we had seen any wheelchairs (this was the first time that she had spoken during the entire trip). There had been a couple of people with what looked as if they might have been wheelchairs that we had passed right at the beginning and so we went back to see, but the people had gone and so, presumably, the wheelchairs (if they were wheelchairs) hadn’t been for sale.

I had my breakfast and took my leave of my landlord. I’d had a really good stay and enjoyed myself there. And it turned out that I had had a good deal there too. I hadn’t even made the slightest enquiry as to the price of the room, and in the end I was charged $75:00 plus taxes per night for my seven-night stay.

That was what I call real value. I was well-impressed with that and, having seen an “Orleans Express” bus passing through the village, that gives me a cunning plan for the winter, if I’m up to it.

When all was said and done, Strider and I headed across the road to the ferry terminal.

And I was ever so impressed with this caravan that was parked up in one of the lanes. I wouldn’t mind having one of those to tow behind Strider. But seriously, I reckon that it really was some kind of garden shed that was being delivered across the St Lawrence.

We didn’t have to wait too long for the F A Gauthier to set sail. Bang on time, in fact which was impressive. I took a comfortable seat right at the front of the cabin and settled down for the journey.

I didn’t stay settled down for all of the journey, though. I had seen a pile of ships sailing along the St Lawrence River and so I went for a closer look.

There were three of them, miles away so that I couldn’t read their names, not even with the zoom lens on full magnification. This was one of the ships, that looks as if it might be a bulk carrier. The second was a container ship and the third might have been a tanker.

Going back to my seat, I was distracted by the smell of chips coming from the galley. I did say that I wouldn’t have anything to eat until I left the ferry, but I was overcome. So much for the strength of my willpower.

We docked bang on time too and I headed off to the IGA supermarket to stock up for the last time. A baguette of course, and some hummus, tomatoes and lettuce for my lunch. I’d decided that the chips that I had had were nothing more than a snack.

And then The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav led me on a merry, mazy way through Matane – and I do have to say that I had more of an idea where I was going than she did. I overruled her on a couple of occasions.

My route took me up the riviere Matane valley and then over the top down to Amqui. I have mentioned before that I have to stop by water to eat my lunch, wherever possible, and for some reason or other there was nowhere suitable. It wasn’t until I reached Causapscal that somewhere suitable hove into view – a nice little park by the bridge over the river.

I had a nice lunch, a good read of my book and a little relax there, with leaves falling upon me like autumn rain. All of that did me the world of good and I ended up being so relaxed that I forgot to take a photograph of it.

All the way down the Matapedia Valley I had noticed that there were railway wagons loaded with sawdust parked in almost every railway siding along the railway.

All of this was explained, rather surprisingly, when I passed over the bridge into New Brunswick. In the distance on the old line on the north shore of the Restigouche River I could see a train heading my way.

Could this be the first moving train that I have seen this year? I couldn’t remember so I had to stop and photograph it. And not only that, the idea of a train on this run-down line, and the existence of what might be described 60 years ago as a “pick-up goods” – well, they were all things that made this train and its locomotives well worth photographing.

And when I do find five minutes, I’ll tell you all about the locomotives too. But I find myself estranged from my Jane’s Train Recognition Guide at the moment.

Nearly spearing a passing vehicle as I exited my parking place, I set off again and headed into the hills, direction St Leonards. You probably noticed the shadows lengthening in the previous photograph. Time was drawing on and I was tired, and I knew that there were several motels along the way.

Funnily enough, nothing appeared for a good few miles until I reached the edge of the town of Kedgwick. I was looking for fuel too as I was about to drop into the final quarter of the tank. An Irvings loomed out of the gloom, and right next door was the O’Regal Restaurant and Motel.

$71:00 taxes included was the price, and although there was no microwave and the place was rather tired, the value was stupendous. There was a lovely, comfortable sofa and I could have held a ball in the room, so big it was.

They rustled up a pizza for me (I still had some cheese left) which was rather expensive, but there wasn’t a lot of competition about and I didn’t want to wander far. This will suit me find.

The bed seems to be comfortable anyway, and so I’ll make the most of that.

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: st lawrence river

Sunday 9th August 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

Tuesday 29th August 2018 – NO PRIZES …

Monday 26th March 2018 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Thursday 21st September 2017 – REGULAR READERS …

Wednesday 20th September 2017 – HAVING HAD …

Monday 18th September 2017 – WELL THAT WAS …

Sunday 17th September 2017 – THAT WASN’T …

Tuesday 12th September 2017 – I’M IN GOOSE …

Friday 26th May 2017 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Wednesday 1st March 2017 – THE TROUBLE …

Thursday 24th November 2016 – YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN …

Sunday 23rd October 2016 – IT’S SUNDAY!

Sunday 9th October 2016 – AND SO THIS IS IT!

Tuesday 4th October 2016 – I’M BACK …

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