The Road Goes On…

We started the morning talking to the couple with the Swiss RV. They brought their camper over from Switzerland and are going to be travelling across Canada and the United States for the next several months. We left the Walmart parking lot at 9:00AM and drove Hwy 138 passing through Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre where there is a huge shrine that attracts a million pilgrims each year. The first chapel was built in 1658. Right next to it is the Cyclorama of Jerusalem, which has nothing to do with bicycles, but which houses a panoramic painting 14 meters high and 110 meters in circumference. We continued on Hwy 138 to Baie-Saint-Paul where we turned onto Hwy 362 which follows the St. Lawrence river. The area is quite hilly and the Roadtrek had to downshift a lot, both up and down the hills. Some of the grades were 11% and extended for several kilometers. This area is stunningly beautiful and has lots of artist galleries.

Lunch was at La Malbaie at a small picnic area overlooking the town and the St. Lawrence river. There was a couple with a white tablecloth each enjoying a glass of red wine – truly La Joie de Vivre.

Very shortly after our healthy lunch we came across Fromagerie St-Fidele and stopped in for some of their cheese, a maple cranberry dressing for future healthy salads and a generous 2 scoop maple-walnut ice cream.

The highway continues to Tadoussac where a ferry takes you across a river. This ferry is free and runs continuously.

We sweat and walked off all the ice cream calories when we visited Longue-Rive, the site of a former wood mill. The mill was in operation from 1860 to 1962 and there are still a few remains of the foundations of the large chutes where the logs were loaded onto ships. There is a waterfall at the site now and the St. Lawrence and the granite offered many great photographic opportunities.

The highway from there to Baie-Comeau isn’t as spectacular and is much more even which allowed us to make good time to our campground for the evening at Pointe-Lebel, a peninsula just outside of Baie-Comeau. On the way we saw a huge hydroelectric plant and we expect to be touring one tomorrow.

Departed Markham around 9:30AM stopping for gas and some last minute groceries. Followed Hwy 401 to Belleville for a stop at Walmart to get an inverter for the RV so we can charge laptops and batteries while driving. Had lunch at McDonalds while we where there and then headed off towards Montreal and Trois-Rivieres. I had programmed the GPS to take us to the intersection of Hwy 40/55 to keep us on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence and it ended up thinking it needed to have us do a U-Turn to get to that intersection. During that detour we discovered a Parks Canada site called des Forges-du-St-Maurice, the site of Canada’s first industrial community. It had unfortunately already closed for the day but it looked interesting so we might come back to it on the way back. Walmart has a policy of allowing one night camping at many of their stores, so once we once we got back on Hwy 40 we phoned the Walmart in Beauport to ask whether we could spend the night in their parking lot. No problem. We finally arrived at 8:40PM and had dinner. By 10:30PM, there were a total of 9 RVs in the parking lot, including one with Swiss license plates.