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PETITE RIVIERE ST FRANCOIS
I was telling you all something like porky pies when I told you all earlier that there was nothing along Highway 138 until Baie St Paul. There is in fact a turning off the main road signposted for Petite Rivière St François.
This has been one of the little scenic diversions that has in the past always looked rather tempting, as you can see. It goes all the way down there to the north shore of the St Lawrence at an average of a mere 11% or One-in-Nine for those of you still working in old money, and for all of about 6 miles too.
In April 2012 I set aside some time for little diversions like this and as it's not too far off lunchtime it seems like the kind of place where a suitable lunch stop might be found.
My first concern is of course lunch. Therefore I was aiming to head all the way down to the end of the road (it is a cul-de-sac down here), eat my butty and then retrace my steps in a much-more-leisurely fashion.
However, the view of Petite Rivière St François in my rear-view mirror as I drove over the brow of a nearby hill brought me to yet another shuddering halt. This view is really something, even with the road signs and power lines.
It's quite a way down here, but eventually we arrive at the end of the road. You can't go any further than here - at least, not in a car.
Had there not been such a bitter wind I would have been tempted to continue on foot, to see how far I could have progressed. It would have been nice to have ended up back at St Joachim . That's a trip that I'm going to have to save for another time.
And you've probably noticed our ephemeral railway too. That's put in another appearance.
The view behind me at this point is quite good too. Maybe not as spectacular as the view towards the west, but nevertheless … And the typical North American wooden houses look quite at home here in this setting, although I would have liked to have come here at any time other than on dustbin day.
Have you noticed the 50kph speed limit sign? I mean, I ask you, who would want to drive along here any faster than that with all of the beautiful scenery that there is to see around here?
Now I wouldn't mind going down there to eat my lunch, that's for sure. Coming back up would be fun though, and I've no idea at all how they manage to come back up in the winter with the snow and the ice, although I bet that going down there in the winter would be exciting.
Anyway, all of this is pretty academic because this place is clearly labelled "private property" and I can quite understand why. If I had a place like that with a view to match, I would want to keep it all for myself too.
Not too far away though is a suitable lunch stop, and this is the view therefrom - right down the St Lawrence in the direction in which I will be travelling. Eastwards, of course.
And if this photo shows anything, I mean apart from the gorgeous weather and bright blue skies that we were having, it shows the value of coming here in late April before the leaves appear on the trees as I have said so many times already. You won't have anything like this view in a couple of weeks time.
I am not alone in this little spot either. Here are Strawberry Moose's first girlfriends of the year, that is unless it is one of his girlfriends from last year with her two daughters and an alimony writ.
That is an assumption that is not unreasonable. I have to keep on reminding His Nibs that he is related to a stag, spelt S-T-A-G. The second letter is not an -H-.
There's also a dirt road just opposite - not a real dirt road like we encountered in Labrador in 2010 but a dirt road none-the-less.
I'm not quite sure, but if I remember correctly, this may well be the first dirt road that I have encountered in 2012, and after seven days of travel too. The first of many dirt roads, I hope, and I intend to travel on as many as possible.
Not this one, unfortunately. It's a private road that leads up to Le Massif, which is probably one of the most exciting alpine-skiing areas on the eastern side of North America, famous for the 770 metre drop over the length of the downhill runs. Not only that, but there can be as much as 240 centimetres of packed snow on the upper slopes in a good year.
That kind of talk is enough to make me want to reach for my skis - after all, it's a long time since I've gone out on the piste. But not right now, though. The snow on the lower slopes disappears quite rapidly in late April so I was told, which is no surprise seeing as it is one of the few south-facing ski slopes that I know of, and so the impressive vertical runs would be somewhat curtailed right now.
Having dealt with the issues of lunch, which, by the way, was a baguette with sliced tomato, lettuce, some spicy salad oil an a couple of slices of vegan cheese, together with some coffee out of the flask that I prepared this morning, it was off to explore.
A short while ago I posted a photo of the village of Petite Rivière St François, taken from a distance. This is a photo taken from within the village.
The area was named by Samuel Champlain in honour of St Francis of Assisi, and was one of the areas ceded to the Compagnie des Cent-Associés de la Nouvelle-France, founded in 1627 under the protection of Cardinal Richelieu to replace the Compagnie de Montmorency which he reckoned was not doing enough to promote colonialisation in Nouvelle France.
In 1662 the area fell into the hands of the Seminary of Québec but despite all of this, it wasn't until 1675 that the first settlers arrived here.
Now, here's a thing. What we have here is a railway station, and a railway station on the line through the Charlevoix.
It's quite modern too as you can see, something of quite recent development and it's something of an enigma to say the least. You may remember earlier today when I was in St Joachim and I was chatting to one of the repairmen on the railway there. He was telling me that the line had been reconstituted merely for the tourist trade and my eagle eye had not failed to notice the absence of a station in what would be prime commuter belt country, even though for several years St Joachim was actually the terminus of the line and had a successful electrically-powered commuter service to Quebec for many years.
So why go to all of the trouble to build a railway station here?
The answer seems to lie a little further up the road at Le Massif. There's an enormous redevelopment project programmed for there, and part of it is said to be the building of some kind of residential facility in the area. With the investment that the railway company has made in the line, but with only a short summer tourist season for now, it makes some kind of sense to try to capture some kind of winter tourist trade too, and I'm sure that skiers might be happier to come to stay at the residential facilities of Le Massif if they didn't have to come here under their own steam, as it were.
But I still think that the railway company is missing the boat by not having a stab at the potential available by tapping the commuter traffic. A Diesel mulitple-unit type of train stationed at La Malbaie and running into Québec early in the morning and back out in the early evening would clean up, I reckon.
However, enough of me and my polemics for a while. That's where I've just been, right down to the end of the road somewhere near the little cape.
You can see the ski runs of Le Massif too, up there on Cap Tourmente. But you'll see that the April sun has been having a good go at them already. You need really exceptional weather conditions to support a south-facing ski slope and that doesn't happen around here. The late Spring and Summer, from what I have seen, are quite often warm and sunny and not even 240cms of snow will last too long in that kind of weather.
However, let's turn our attention once more to the little town of Petite Rivière St François. It's been described as a linear town, and from here you'll see that that is hardly surprising, hemmed in as it is between the river in front and the mountains behind.
Angriculture on any kind of scale is out of the question of course, unless you are aiming for mountain goats, and so the locals turned their hand to the more traditional Québecois occupations such as timber and fishing, with the odd bit of boat-building and maple syrup-harvesting thrown in for good measure.
While you admire the scenery to the east of us, you can sit here and muse, just as I'm doing right now, on the possibility of grape-growing on some sort of scale.
We've seen grapes take quite a hold of the Ile d'Orleans downstream a little and so it's quite feasible to grow them in this part of the world but what has got me thinking is the speed at which all of the snow has disappeared at La Massif.
It seems that this area could well be something of a natural sun-trap and if a way could be found to protect the vines from the intense cold in winter - "heavy-duty plastic greenhouses maybe" ...ed - we could be on to something here.
You were probably wondering where I was when I took those photographs just now. I wasn't on a boat but in fact sticking out into the river is some kind of promontory that you might have noticed in the photo that I posted earlier of the village. It was out here that I had been a-wandering.
There's a lighthouse of sorts here, with some kind of visitor centre but, as you might expect, there wasn't anyone around to talk to about the place. Then again, regular readers of this rubbish are used to me breaking and entering into visitor attractions in order to have my money's worth in the absence of any more-formal visitor arrangements. Here, there didn't seem to be much point in getting up to any antics like that.
Anyway, that's enough of that. It's time to retrace my steps and rejoin the main highway up in the hills at the back. I must press on.
As for the value of this detour, what do you reckon? I give it 9 out of 10, and had a train gone rattling past while I was here at the railway station, it would have had the lot.
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