Today’s highlight was visiting the Empress of Ireland Museum. The Empress of Ireland was an ocean liner that sank in 1914 after colliding with a coal ship Storstad in dense fog. The Empress of Ireland sank in 14 minutes and 1012 of the 1477 people aboard died. William Clark, who worked on the Titanic and survived her sinking, also worked on the Empress of Ireland and survived her sinking.

The museum has a large number of artifacts recovered from the wreck on display.

Some of the display tables are made from teak planks recovered from the ship. A history study from McGill, who is worked at the museum for the summer, gave us some interesting extra bits of information. One of the displays features the brass letters of the ship’s name from the stern of the ship. All of the letters except for the ‘D’ in ‘IRELAND’ are solid brass. The original ‘D’ must have been lost or damaged and was replaced with a brass sheet affixed to cork.

The wreck site, in 45m of water off the coast was designated a historic site which protects further artifacts from being removed. Many divers have done this very challenging dive and five have lost their lives in the process.

Now hungry, we stopped for croissants and coffee and tea at a local bakery.

Tonight we are staying at the Phare Cap Chat campground featuring a working lighthouse, a beautiful view of the St. Lawrence, walkways and tree. The folks running the campground are really welcoming and supportive and the sites are very reasonably priced.

After breakfast we left our great campground and drove to Projet Éole, a wind farm nearby which has the world’s largest vertical axis wind turbine. This was built as a research project in the 1980s to study and improve the efficiency of wind mills. The wind mill was commissioned in 1987 and shut down in 1993 as the efficiency of horizontal wind turbines improved.

The wind mill is 110 metres high with a 350 ton rotor and 100 ton alternator, producing 3.8 megawatts of power. The two guides were terrific and provided lots of information, both technical and historical.

The next major stop was at Couleur Chocolat in nearby St. Anne des Monts for ice cream and blueberry sorbet dipped in dark chocolate. The chocolatier, Carl Pelletier, is a very precise man and creates many diverse types of chocolate goodies, four of which joined us on our trip. Three remain.

Exploramer is an interactive museum about the St. Lawrence and the fascinating life that exists within its waters. We learned so much about invertibrates such as squid and octopus. Did you know that octopuses have three hearts and blue blood? Now you do!

At 3:30, there was an interactive learning event with touching various sea creatures like starfish, sea urchins and lobsters.

It is definitely worth a visit!

The last stop for today was the glass blower Le Cueilleur de Verre. We had seen some of his work at Exploramer but he has even nicer marine life inspired pieces in his workshop, and we were unable to resist taking home a memory.

It was getting late and we hadn’t made it very far, so we decided to return to the Phare Cap Chat campground for another night. We received a very friendly welcome.

Before going to sleep we walked down to the waterfront and along the beach.

After a brief stop at the Metro grocery store to buy groceries we travelled down Hwy 299 for a new adventure. Near the junction of Hwy 299 and the Murdochville road, there is the Mont Lyall Agate Mine (48.80427N, 66.08610W) where we prospected for geodes and agate after a brief training session of what to look for and which types were no good.

It was very hot and humid and hard work, but in the end we used our pick hammers and dug up some rocks to take down to the stone cutter who told us which ones were promising and cut those open for us. After all the hard work, we had three rocks that were good.

A nearby stream of cold, fresh water helped cool us down and reversed the effects of heat exhaustion.

On our east coast trip in 2019 we discovered Ferme Bourdages (48.07730N, 65.59403W) which had the best strawberries we’ve ever had. It was time to pay them a visit again, but alas, no strawberries available this time. It was disappointing, but a strawberry vine and strawberry pie would have to do. The pie survived about half an hour while the vine will be coming home with us.

To our great surprise, the farm offers full-featured free overnight camping with toilets, showers, laundry, dump station and even electricity.

We met a German couple with a licence plate starting with MG which is the Mönchengladbach area in Germany where Ruth is originally from. They were just finishing three months of touring eastern Canada in the 18 year old RV that they had shipped over from Germany and that was having some mechanical problems, so we hope they make it back to Halifax so it can be shipped home.