Monday September 7, 1998 - Quebec

Riviere-du-loup - cloud and sun.

Isaac and Gretel got up very early and had left by 6.00am for Toronto. I started packing and was ready to leave by 8.20am. Said my good byes and was off.

I made pretty good time until I got to New Brunswick. First I stopped for souvenirs in Sackville, and then I made awrong turn and started heading for Shediac. I bought gas outside of Moncton and missed my turnoff for the back road via Renous and had to double back. The gas station was right on the turnoff but I didn't realize that at the time.

I stopped for supper on the Renous - Plaster Rock road. It was a beautiful sunny clear day and the leaves are just starting to turn, the hillsides were touched with russet and bronze. I was planning to get cheaper gas in Edmunston but I missed it and ended up going back because I didn't want to pay the Quebec price just yet. And so, as a result of all that I did not get to Riviere-du-loup until 7.00pm and the last ferry across the river was at 6.00pm.

I forgot to mention that Sam had sent me email from his Quebec Katimavik posting saying how much he liked it and giving me his address and phone number in La Malbaie. I looked at a map and realized that it was just across the river from Riviere-du-loup and that there was a ferry crossing there. I thought I could visit him there on the way home. I had also phoned Beth in the Toronto area yesterday and had told her I would be in Toronto on the 8th and could visit her on the 9th. But now that I had narrowly missed the ferry my schedule was going to be all out of whack.

I found a good campground right next to the ferry dock and went to bed early. The first ferry will be at 8.00am so I need to be up early to be at the ferry dock for 6.30am.

Monday August 3, 1998 - PEI

Fanningbrook - sunny and warm.

I left Evergreen Acres fairly early and drove as much as possible along coast roads to Cape Tormentine. I was listening to the CBC radio station in Charlottetown, but PEI was too far away across the water to see it. The coast seemed typically Maritime, and like a lot of places on the Nova Scotia coasts. Shediac is a busy tourist town. I drove past the turnoff for the Confederation Bridge to PEI to go to Cape Tormentine to see the old ferry port. It is a very quiet town with a big abandoned ferry terminal. You could drive around the line-up areas and I took some photos of the bridge from there. It looks pretty amazing, you can only the see the part extending out from the New Brunswick shore, and then it just disappears into the distance. You can't see the other end of the bridge.

Around noon I crossed the bridge, it is 13 km (8 miles) long and takes about 10 minutes to cross. First you climb and climb and then you go down down down to PEI. On the New Brunswick side is nothing except signs saying No Stopping. The sides of the bridge are too high to see over so there is nothing to see except the road and other cars. On the PEI side is Gateway Village, a very elaborate Visitors' Centre with all kinds of displays and tourist shops. It was packed. There were even line-ups just to speak to someone at the Visitor Information desks and to get maps and tourist brochures. When I left I saw the line-up of cars leaving the island.

The drive to Charlottetown is less than an hour through farmland: potatoes, grain and clover. In Charlottetown I tried calling Cindy's work number from a payphone in a mall, but I just got an answering machine. She works at a daycare centre. So I looked up the name of the daycare centre in the Yellow Pages at the payphone and found the address, then tried to find a map with street names. Finally I found one in a grocery store and I memorized the location and drove out there. It was close by where the payphone was located, but I couldn't find the street number. There was a church in roughly the right location so I went in and asked a man in an office if this was the correct address. He said it was and that the daycare was in the basement. Cindy was on the phone in the daycare office.

Cindy said she had to go to the dentist before going home and she thought it would take no more than 40 minutes. She said I could just wait at the church. I parked in the church parking lot and had some lunch. I fed Yohan and took him for a walk. I waited a while and then finally pulled out some mending and did some sewing while I waited. She got back two and a half hours later.

Cindy started talking right away about her kids, just started right in as soon as we'd said Hello. Went on for awhile and then we went to pick up her youngest son Mark at a house across the street. She had a few errands to run in town and I got gas for the truck before we drove out to their farm. Mark rode with me in case I lost track of Cindy. The last stretch of driving was on a very dusty dirt road, I could not see Cindy's car right ahead of me, so it was a good thing I had Mark with me to tell me when we got to their driveway.

Their house is set way back off the road with a grove of trees behind it and lawn all around it. There's a trampoline on one side of the house. They have sold off most of the farm and kept only the house, barn and a couple of fields. It used to be 200 acres.

We had a very late dinner with Mark and Nicholas (middle son)—sausage and vegetables and salad from their garden.

Sunday August 2, 1998 - New Brunswick

Kouchibouquac - sunny and warm.

I left Cime Aventure around 8.00 am and drove all the way to Matapedia, then up the Matapedia Valley as far as Amqui. I like the song by the McGarrigles about this river so I wanted to see it. I turned around and came back to cross the Restiguoche to Campbellton, New Brunswick. That was around 2.00 pm Quebec time and 3.00 pm New Brunswick time.

The Matapedia

Both rivers, the Matapedia and the Restigouche, are salmon rivers and both very pretty. The Matapedia is fairly shallow, I saw salmon fishers standing in the river and several canoes going down river. The upper valley is broad with farmland and the lower valley is narrow and V-shaped.

Campbellton

In New Brunswick I took the highway to Kouchibouquac in hopes of getting there in time to get a campsite, but I arrived at 6.30 pm and it was full. So I could have taken the long way around the coast, the highway did not make a difference. At the provincial campground they recommended a nearby private campground, Evergreen Camping, where I managed to get a site. I stopped in Miramichi (Chatham and Newcastle amalgamated) to phone the Meyers, who I will be staying with in PEI. Cindy told me to call her at work tomorrow in Charlottetown before 2.00 pm. Karl was just leaving for a truck haul to New York.

The highway was pretty boring with hardly any rest stops. Quebec has so many that are spaced evenly and actually quite restful, but they have so few out-of-province tourists. It's too bad really, it's a great place to visit and I found francophone speakers very accommodating with anglophones outside of the major cities.

The last leg

This post covers the period of November 17 - 20, 2010, the trip from Toronto Ontario to Wolfville Nova Scotia.

I ended up leaving Toronto a day later than planned. The week before my doctor had sent me off for a round of standard tests, the kind that you are supposed to do periodically. I had not expected that but rather than explain the situation to her I just went off and did it. Well, it turned out one of those tests had a questionable result and they phoned to make an appointment for me to do some follow-up testing.

I told the lady that I was leaving the city that very day and so would do the follow-up in Nova Scotia, she freaked and strongly advised me to hang around for the appointment, the next week. I said that was just not in the cards.

So the lady in question asked me to give her an hour or so while she made some calls, and then called me back to say she had me rescheduled for that afternoon. Reluctantly I agreed and postponed my leaving until the next day.

As it turned out, the follow-up test was negative, there was no problem after all. I suppose I should have been relieved, but mostly I was just annoyed at having spent my day in a medical facility and postponed leaving for nothing.

The thing is, I had been carefully following the weather along my route and I knew I had a brief window of fair weather if I left as planned, now that window was closed. If I hung around for another week another window might have opened, but all this waiting is starting to get to me. So I left first thing the next day.

My plan was, drive to Ottawa and stay with a friend there over night, then drive from there to Nova Scotia in a day and a half, with one night on the road somewhere in New Brunswick. I did manage to do that with clear weather all the way, but it was bloody cold. And I had one of the coldest nights I have ever spent, at an Irving Big Stop near Fredericton.

The catalytic heater I bought worked fine, but the stupid butane lighter I bought to start it with did not. Fortunately I had matches as a backup which was fine just before going to bed, but when I woke up with frozen feet a few hours later, I managed to also freeze my hands fumbling with the matches trying to light the heater again. Crawling back into the sleeping bag piled with blankets didn't help, so I was up well before dawn and back on the road just to warm up. The kind overnight attendant at the Irving gave me my mug of coffee for free.

The upside I guess is that I arrived at my destination just after noon that day, a good hour before the snow started. And I got to watch a pretty impressive sunrise. Not only was the southeast lit up with red and purple clouds but the northwest was also lit up with a purple glow. There was one sundog to the east of the rising sun, but its western mate not apparent in the dark snow clouds in that direction.