The Road Goes On…

2012 Trans Labrador Highway

  • New Richmond to Forillon National Park

    After breakfast and cleanup we emptied and filled tanks and then headed out towards Gaspe. Our first stop was at a garage sale that had new pants for $5, new sweaters for $10 and silver plated candle holders for $1 each. $48 dollars later, I had three pairs of pants, three new sweaters and Ruth had three new candle holders.

    A little further up the road was a GM dealer and we dropped in to have the tire pressure monitoring system looked at.  The tool required to reset the monitors turned out to be a pretty expensive looking piece of kit and the spare tire wheel turns out not to have one of these sensors in it so we had to swap out the spare with the now fixed original wheel.  $57 later, the Roadtrek was happy once again too, not to mention freshly washed.  Great service!

    One of the next towns has painted all their fire hydrants as cartoon characters.

     

    By this time we were hungry and stopped at one of the many municipal rest areas along the way.  This one had a swimming pool and ocean view and we had our sandwiches enjoying the sunshine at one of their picnic tables. Ruth got caught in a lobster trap.

    After lunch we drove to Perce which has a nearby island that is home to many, many seabirds and a unique rock formation with an arch in it. There was a helicopter operation nearby and for $300 Ruth and I had a 20 minute aerial tour of the area. Spectacular!

      

    Hwy 132 in this area is very curvy and scenic and goes through many small towns. There are lots of motels and campgrounds and there are a lot of tourists. Definitely a place to return to.

    Our home for the night was Forillon National Park. This park was created in 1970 when land was expropriated. Some of the buildings, such as a general store, have historic significance and have been preserved as they would have been at the time they were in use.

    There is a 4km hiking trail that leads to Cap de Gaspe, the site of a lighthouse. All three of us hiked the trail (and back for a total of 8km) and enjoyed the view at the lighthouse and the two porcupines that were having dinner on the grass there.  They were incredibly tame and we got within about 3 feet of them.

     

  • Forillon National Park to Kamouraska

    The Forillon south campground has a service building that has great shower facilities and washrooms and it was only a short walk from our nicely wooded camping site. After a nice long hot shower we packed up and left with a target destination of Matane.

    We didn’t get all that far before we stopped to photograph another lighthouse at Cap des Rosiers.

    Soon afterwards we found ourselves in a rain and thunderstorm so we decided to drive as far as we could before stopping for the evening.

    For lunch we stopped at Cantine des Pecheurs for fish and chips but were disappointed.

    At the Fromagerie des Basques in Trois Pistoles and stocked up on more than enough cheese, bread and a pie.

    Dinner was at St-Hubert in Riviere-du-Loup or Riviere-du-Lop as our GPS calls it.

    We made it to Kamouraska but not before stopping to watch and photograph a stunning sunset vista.

    We’re staying at the Vistor Center parking lot, along with a number of other RVs and hope to get up before sunrise tomorrow at 5:17AM in order to photograph some more.  This area is very picturesque.

  • Kamouraska to Arnprior

    The morning arrived extremely early – 4:30 to be precise. We quickly got dressed and then drove to the wharf we’d been at the night before but found the light lacking. We then drove to the other side of town where we found the sun rising with a farm in the foreground. Another spectacular sight and many images were captured.

    We then returned to the wharf and photographed some more.

     

    After a quick stroll throught town and breakfast we headed to Quebec City and we lucky to get one of the last parking spots in the lower part by the river. We immediately walked into “Les Fetes de la Nouvelle France”, a celebration of early French Canadian history, complete with costumes, crafts, foods and genealogy booths.

       

    Lunch was salmon with bearnaise sauce and a baked potato at Hotel Ste-Anne.

    From there we drove to Breezy Hill Camping for the night and got the last spot which turned out to be a little too steep for our Roadtrek’s minimal ground clearance. We were then directed another site normally occupied by a seasonal camper who was away that night.

  • Arnprior to Haliburton

    Before leaving Breezy Hill campground we emptied and filled tanks and then drove into some stormy weather with a brief but very strong downpour.

    Our routing took us through Bancroft where the annual Gemboree was taking place.  This is a rockhound and semi precious stone collector’s haven and occupies both the arena and community center. Here you’ll find beads, minerals, meteorites as well as all sorts of new age healing crystals. One stand offered a stone from Russia that claims to be “composed of nearly all the elements of the Periodic Table”.  Another stand offered one with only 7 elements but still claimed to be able to cure pretty much anything that might ail you.

    After a quick lunch we drove to the annual get-together of some of our friends at a cottage in Haliburton. About 40 people, mostly kids of our friends now, were celebrating the August long weekend by swimming, water skiing, canoeing, sailing, jumping off cliffs into the water and talking to good friends.

  • Haliburton to Home

    Today was a gorgeous day for sailing and a swim. Unfortunately a gorgeous long weekend and vacation need to come to an end. At 4:30 we started our final trek home, only sweetened by an ice cream at Kawartha Dairy in Minden.

    After that we still had to find one last dumping station to clean out our tanks. We found one at Hammock Harbour RV Park in Orillia which charged us $16 for the privilege.

    The traffic on the rest of the trip wasn’t too bad, except for the area just south of Barrie. We hadn’t been in any real traffic for three and a half weeks, so it felt a little weird.

    What worked and what didn’t:

    The Roadtrek 190 Popular performed very well with some minor exceptions such as a furnace/AC/heat pump controller that didn’t work right and some moulding and an interior light cover that came off. The Roadtrek allows us to go for about 3 days without needing water or dumping and the built-in inverter allowed us to charge our laptops, phone, GPS and camera batteries. The Roadtrek has level indicators for the grey and black tanks but these are unreliable. We found flushing the black tank with water and then dumping it again helped with it reading empty when it really was empty.  The macerator pump worked well. It is surprising how much fits into the Roadtrek and one develops a real admiration for the design and though that went into its construction. Ferries and rough terrain can be a challenge given its low clearance and long wheelbase.

    Ruth needs her coffee in the morning and a stainless steel Italian coffee maker on the stove worked really well.

    The SiriusXM receiver built into the Roadtrek wasn’t really useful except for the last two days when we were driving south or south-west.  It was totally unusable in the maritimes and was busy acquiring its signal more than it was playing music.

    The 4 ton hydraulic bottle jack I bought for $29 to lift the Roadtrek when changing spares worked well.  The scissor jack that comes with the Roadtrek isn’t all that useful because of all of the tanks located underneath.

    The Telus Huawei E587 Mobile WiFi device provided us with 3G/4G  Internet access on our trip and worked very well as long as there was cellular network coverage. Telus and Bell are the only providers to have any coverage in Labrador, many parts of Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. The E587 allows up to 5 wireless devices to access the Internet simultaneously so we could use our laptops and iPads all on one data plan. We used Skype on the iPad to make outgoing calls when necessary.

    If you’re looking for information on the Trans-Labrador highway, these sites are very useful:

    http://www.tlhwy.com
    http://www.tourismlabrador.com/home/files/pg/trans_labrador_highway_guide_may_2012.pdf