Having had a very pleasant night asleep on the Ile aux Coudres I found myself back on the mainland near St Joseph-de-la-Rive, and here I stumbled upon our railway line, the one that we've been following on-and-off since the city of Québec.

No train upon it yet, but having seen the train twice yesterday, on the outward as well as the inbound journey, we can all live in hope.

There is quite a story to this railway line, but to everything its season and you'll have to wait for the appropriate moment, such as when we are near St Irenée for me to tell you its tale.

The railway line is not the only thing here worth seeing either. We have a small waterfall, although little more than a cascade over the rocks, that is tumbling its way down to the water's edge and into the Saint Lawrence.

I've no idea what river it might be either, but one thing that I can say is that this cascade hasn't received any special kind of publicity - it's just "here". Anywhere else, this would merit a half-dozen signposts and a car park all to itself. It shows you the kind of scenery or natural wonder that is available in this kind of area that a cascade such as this can pass by without comment.

Tearing my eyes away from the cascade, I look westwards along the coast in the direction from which I have just driven. And you can see why I said that it is beautiful, can't you?

Last night , as I mentioned earlier, I spent the night on the Ile aux Coudres, which is over there to the left. The town just down there to the right is St Joseph-de-la-Rive and its from a jetty down there on that spit of land that the ferry sails.

In the tourist season there are two ferries that ply across the St Lawrence to the island, as you can clearly see in this photo taken in September 2011.

If you've been following my adventures from September that year, by the way, you will remember that on that particular day I was being chased along the coast by a fog bank and every time that I stopped, it caught up with me. You can certainly tell which photos were taken on that visit!

Here's a close-up view of the harbour from up here, again from September 2011, as you can tell by looking at the healthy vegetation and the leaves on the trees.

If you can peer through the doom and gloom you might have a better view of the two ferries going about their business. I have to admit something of a pang of regret to not to have been on board one of them, especially when I discovered that the crossing was without charge, but I made up for that in April 2012.

A few months later, at the very beginning of May 2012, there were no such issues and while the morning might have been a little grey and the vegetation still suffering from the effects of a long and hard winter, at least you can see the view.

Just one boat out there during the off-season. That's the Joseph Savard down there, upon which I sailed last night out to the island and back again this morning. Built in 1985 (an age which would rule her out for plying for hire in the European Union, incidentally), she's 63 metres long and displaces all of 589 tonnes.

As for Joseph Savard, he was, apparently, the first colonist to settle on the island.

I keep on saying that with a decent camera and a long lens, and plenty of patience of course, you can pull out some really good photos even when the weather is not quite with you.

This year I've come armed especially with a 75-305mm zoom lens and every now and again I give it a little airing. This shot of St Joseph-de-la-Rive, the Baie St Paul and the Laurentides taken from the same spot as the previous photo seems to work in spades.

From this little spec halfway up the hill there's probably the best view of the Ile aux Coudres and judicious use of the zoom lens means that I can fit it all into the shot. To the extreme right of the island on what looks like some kind of sandspit is the place where I parked up last night, and what a good night's sleep that was.

If you are wondering, as I'm sure that you are, the island is as small as it looks, measuring 11 kilometres long by just 3 kilometres wide.

I'm not quite sure now why it was that in May 2012 I took this photo of the north-eastern end of the island. But that bit of sandspit out there must add on a kilometre or two to the overall length of the island.

And at least in the weather that we were having back then, there was something of a clear view right across to the south bank of the river. I'll be over there in due course.

From this particular viewpoint there's a road that runs right down to the river bank and then alongside the river for a way, according to The Lady Who Lives in the SatNav. Of course, with exploring being one of my favourite pastimes while I'm here in North America, this has to be a positive option.

The first thing that I encounter down here on this road in May 2012 is a man teaching a little girl to ride a bike. And didn't that bring back happy memories of when I was step-father to Roxanne for a few years?

Here's a shot from the end of this little road, which is of course (did you need to ask?) a cul-de-sac which obliges me to make a demi-tour back to where the cascade is.

Where I actually am is close to the epicentre of a famous earthquake that occurred in 1663. It's said that in that year there was a series of devastating earthquakes - someone counted 33 in total - all along the St Lawrence River. The first one, centred round about the mouth of the Saguenay River, was said to be one of the worst to ever hit North America and while the one that occurred just here was nothing like as bad, it caused a whole mountainside to topple into the water. And this is what we are standing upon. This area is called Les Eboulements, which means "landslide" in French.

The surprising thing about this series of earthquakes is that it is said that not a soul was killed or even injured, despite the devastation; However, they do say that the priests were kept busy day and night hearing the confessions of the thousands who wished to bare their souls prior to the Day of Judgement, and even the traders of illicit liquor mended their ways "just in case", but for how long, history does not record.

There's something of a better view of the jetty and of Cap Tourmente and the Laurentides, but you can see that there's yet another cloud now welling up from the Saint Lawrence and I'm about to lose the view again.

Back at the top of the hill again I find a parking area where there is a really good view over the St Lawrence (or, at least, there would be if these clouds would lift)

But in this car park I'm planning to eat my first dish of humble pie. If you were with me on my trip around the Trans-Labrador Highway last year you might recall that I criticised the Québecois for what I considered to be their monolingual policy, even at important tourist sites. But here there are a few tourist information boards, quite modern, but which include information in English. In italics, and in small type too, but it's there nevertheless.

I wasn't alone up here either. There was a guy quite happily painting away, and his work wasn't at all bad either. Furthermore he had plenty to say for himself, most of which I was keen to hear, and we spent well over an hour having a really good chat.

He was the first person who knew the difference between the Israelis and the Zionists without having to be prompted, and was also well-aware of the fascists currently in power in the USA, the UK and many other Western countries and how these fascists were destroying people's liberties and bringing an end to freedom as we oldies once knew it.

He also told me a story about how there is a Canadian nuclear power station along the south shore of the St Lawrence, and how the Septics insist on sending inspectors to examine it. I asked if Canadian inspectors had the same rights in Three Mile Island, to which he let loose the most enormous guffaw.

His further comments on this subject, which don't bear repeating on this a family web site, go, if true, to underline my opinion of just how much the Canadian government has sold out its independence to the bully-boy tactics of its Fascist neighbour on its southern border. Why the Canadian government doesn't have the courage to stand up and tell the Septics to sod off and do their worst if they don't like it is something beyond my comprehension.

He reckons that well-filled brown envelopes have changed hands somewhere along the line, but of course I wouldn't even consider such an outrageous opinion - not even for a moment. I simply repeat the suggestion to show just how cynical the average Canadian has become just recently.

It's a fact though, as I have been saying for years, with conspiracy theories that it's not the theories and neither is it the theorists that are the issue. What is the issue is the fact that most westerners have lost so much confidence in their governments that they are prepared to take these theories seriously. It's the loss of confidence in the government that's the issue.

As an aside, we hadn't been talking long before he asked me how long I had lived in Belgium. He reckoned that people who speak French from Brussels speak it in a different way to the French from Paris, with rounded and rolling ends and apparenty I talk like that.

Anyway, such was the painter. A really interesting guy and I could have stayed there all day talking to him.

While I was chatting away to my painter friend, out of the fog and mist loomed this really big cargo ship heading down the St Lawrence towards the sea. Of course, with ships and shipping being something of interest to me, this was another photo opportunity as well.

With the name of the owners being so prominent on the side of the ship, it made me wonder whether or not it was the same ship that was anchored across the river from Québec City when I was there yesterday.

Who knows? - "I do - and yes it was" ...ed
Maybe we shall meet again - "and yes, indeed we shall" ...ed.

Anyway, now it's time to rejoin Highway 362 at the top of the hill, and here we encounter a rather unusual kind of farm. and I can just imagine the conversation with the owner.
"And what do you do for a living?"
"I'm a farmer."
"And what kind of farm do you have?"
"I'm a llama farmer."
"And what made you become a llama farmer?"
"I think that it was in my kharma to become a llama farmer"
Well, anyway, your khama has just run over my dogma, because these are alpaca. And don't bring your tennis racquet here because they are no relation to Kerry Packer, even though I'm Kerry Packered after writing all of this.

I've mentioned before that the region around Baie St Paul is one of the most-painted regions of Québec, and the number of galleries in Les Eboulements, where the local artists exhibit their wares, is quite astonishing given the size of the town. I didn't bother to look in any because even if I were to find an undiscovered Clarence Gagnon, it would be well out of my pocket.

It is reckoned that the topography of the area where I am was caused by the impact of a meteorite over 350 million years ago. Apparently I have just driven over one of the ripples out of the centre of the impact.

That range of hills over there is thought to be the outer rim of the crater and that mountain over there looks pretty impressive. I've no idea how it might have been formed, but one could speculate that the impact threw up rocks and soil to a more-or-less equivalent height all around, but any rock or soil bank that was less solid would have been eroded away more quickly over the passage of time.

But pretty as the area might be, I'm not staying around here for long as I have yet another scenic diversion to undertake.

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