 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
A VIEW OF BAIE ST PAUL
And so leaving the visitor centre, we'll go steaming down the hill (which I'll show you in due course) at a rapid rate of knots, keeping a large eye open for Highway 362 to the right, because that's the road that we shall be taking next.
If you are coming from Québec that is. If you are coming from the east, from the mouth of the St Lawrence and doing this trip in reverse you will have a huge crick in the back of your neck.
Highway 362 is the back road into Baie St Paul, and it continues on down quite a hill.
At the bottom of the hill you are greeted with this road junction, with Baie St Paul off around the bend to the left. But if you have the time to spare, my advice is to take the right-hand turning just there.
At this particular moment I didn't have much say in the matter as there was an "incident" along the road in the direction of Baie St Paul and so it seemed like a good idea to try to find a good viewpoint elsewhere.
After a short drive you are confronted by this junction right in front of you.
If you turn to the right, you go up a steep hill and after about 300 metres you'll find yourself in a farmer's yard and without any kind of view of what was going on along the road to Baie St Paul. My advice is therefore to turn to the left down the Chemin de la Pointe. always assuming that your vehicle isn't an artic and doesn't weigh more than 22 tons.
Well, I've managed to find myself on a dirt road haven't I? Although I saw one a little earlier today this is in fact the first one that I've driven down, and after all of seven days too.
And there's snow in the ditches at the sides of the roads too Isn't it fun? It's just like back "home" on the Trans-Labrador Highway
although I would willingly swap any section of dirt road up there in Upper Labrador for this stretch of road just here.
You may have noticed in one of the earlier photographs that the Chemin de la Pointe is a cul-de-sac and so my usual practice would be to go down to the end, do a U-turn and come back to look at whatever it was that I had seen on the way down.
However I felt obliged to stop and take a photo of this little lake, complete with little beach and heap of snow, just here on my left. I reckoned that it was well-worth the price of the admission.
There were a couple of cabins around here too and that really gave me a few ideas, not to mention a slight pang of jealousy, but there was no decent access to take any photographs of them, which really was a shame. It would be lovely to live around here.
The Chemin de la Pointe is, as I have said, a cul-de-sac, and here I am almost at the end. The road stops right down there in the centre of the photograph and it's not possible to go any further.
What I have to do now is to turn round and go back to take a closer look at the things I noticed on the way in. And there were plenty of those to be going on with.
This house here caught my eye on the way down. It's a beautiful modern house of course and although it's facing east rather than south, there's a very good reason for that, and that is that the view over there to the east is absolutely magnificent.
The view is right across the Baie St Paul and along the coast in the direction of Malbaie. And I'll be heading along that way in due course.
And that's not all either. If I move around a little and peer more closely through the vegetation, not only do I have a better view of the house but there is a view out to the ile aux coudres as well.
The ile aux coudres is not too far out in the river and there's a ferry that goes off out there too, and so that's another one of the places that I have in mind to visit while I'm here.
Yes, I'll gladly change places with the owner of this property any time he likes.
Heading back along the road, there's a little parking space on the right with an absolutely excellent view of the town of Baie St Paul.
I spent a very agreeable hour or two in the town back in September 2011 and so my little guided tour of the north shore of the St Lawrence will be taking you there on
the next page
. I'll tell you all about it when we arrive there.
Regardless of that, one thing that you will notice (apart from the railway line in the foreground) about the town is its situation. Away out there in the background are the Laurentides, and in between two of the mountains is a valley through which runs a river.
This river, the Rivière du Gouffre, of course brings down from the Laurentides an enormous pile of silt with the spring meltwater and it's this rejuvenation of the soil that is responsible for making this area something of an important agricultural centre.
And as an aside, those mountains in the background are the highest peaks in the Laurentides, rising to over 1200 metres high.
Looking closely at the above photograph, if I'm not mistaken, there was a plume of smoke over there and so it was worth having a crop out of the image and enlarging it to see if I could see something definite.
And at the building in the foreground to the right of the church, there's certainly some kind of "issue" taking place. I shall have to go for a closer look in a little bit.
And while I'm busy cropping bits out of images, there was a building that I saw when I was here in 2011 and which you will get to see on the next page, but what with one thing and another it wasn't possible to take a very clear photograph of it while I was standing in front of it.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, which does happen every now and again believe it or not, that's a really good view of it from the rear, and so a close-up photo seemed to be in order.
Road transport along the north shore of the St Lawrence is something of a comparatively recent phenomenon. I bet that a goodly proportion of the inhabitants of this area will have a vivid memory of the days when the only connection between many of the settlements along the coast was by water
The boats that plied their trade along the coast were known as goélettes and I've heard it said, and seen it written, that these days there are many of these goélettes lying abandoned along the coast.
Of course, I wouldn't know a goélette even if one were to jump up and bite me, but nevertheless, there's a boat lying abandoned on the beach over there, and there's no reason to suppose that it might not be a goélette. If you have any ideas on the subject, please .
Also in 2011 I remember standing on a headland - the Cap aux Corbeaux - on the road round to La Malbaie via St Irenée and the coast while I took a whole raft of photos of the town and the surroundings.
You will also be standing up there with me on the next page but in the meantime, just as a point of reference, it was somewhere up there where I was standing at the time.
Something else that I had noticed on my way in was a river called the Rivière des Goudronniers. It seems that back in 1670, the Intendant of Nouvelle France, the famous Jean Talon, gave his authority to the establishment of a goudronnerie, or tar-works here on the shores of the bay, using the sap of the pine trees as the base material.
No matter that the territory was already ceded to the seminary of Québec, Talon drew on the reserve hidden in the statutes that he had the authority to "take whenever and wherever necessary all the wood that might be necessary for the greater good of France".
Of course, his action was somewhat controversial, and even more so when the proprietors of the new Goudronnerie began to encroach upon land that had been allocated to other people. They eventually laid claim to the entire bay but by then all of the locals had had enough and not even the support of our friend the enigmatic Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac whom we met at Berthierville a few days ago
could save them from being run out of town like common pygmies.
The Rivière des Goudronniers has to make something of a drop in order to enter the bay here, and so there's something of an impressive little waterfall just here at the side of the road.
Stepping back a little way from the road from where I took the previous photograph (I was actually on the bridge just then) there's a much better perspective that gives you a better view of the falls.
It was also from this spot that I reckoned that it might be possible to cross the beach to reach the abandoned goélette. I had also been hearing, on and off, the distant whistle of a railway engine in the distance although a good scan of the horizon had revealed nothing at all.
Suddenly, around the bend, came a-clattering locomotive 1868 of the Le Massif de Charlevoix railway pulling a line of carriages behind it. Yes, you might remember that earlier this morning while we were back at our motel in Québec we'd seen the train go a-clattering out of the city. Now we were seeing it going a-clattering back.
It was clearly my lucky day as far as the train was concerned.
Of course, I had fixed the long zoom lens to the camera for a nice long-hop shot of the goélette so the photos of the train didn't really work out. Whilst I couldn't manage to capture the second of the three engines attached to the train, there's a nice view of the third one, locomotive 1821.
As far as I can tell, these locomotives are RS18 machines, built by the Montreal Locomotive Works sometime in the 1960s and powered by an impressive V12 1800 horsepower diesel-electric engine.
As for the carriages, which you can't see in these photographs, there are two types. Some double-deck carriages have been bought from the Metra, the suburban railway system around the suburbs of Chicago, and the others are "Keystones" from the Pennsylvania Railroad.
What I did find the most interesting about this train though was that, as far as I could see, there wasn't even one passenger aboard.
So having dealt with the issues of the train on the railway line and leaving the history of the line until another page it's now time to turn my attention to the issues of the goélette.
And as you might expect, knowing the luck that I usually have, it's not possible to go out there for a closer view as the Rivière du Gouffre is in the way. Still, at least from this position and with the long zoom lens, there's quite an impressive view into the cargo hold of the ship.
It's hard to imagine that maybe as recently as just 20 years ago, this ship was plying its trade, with its holds fully laden with all kinds of material, up and down the coast along here.
And I'm sure that you are all wondering whether I left the Goelette alone and I abandoned the hunt to track it down
Well, come on! You should know me better than that by now!
It's not far on from there that we rejoin Highway 362 for Baie St Paul, but before we do, there's something else of interest that has caught my eye.
You might recall just now when we were at Petite Rivière St François that I was discussing the possibility of viniculture on the south-facing slopes and the need to protect the plants from the severe cold and frosts.
What I do back home in the early spring is to cover my vegetable plots with a thick layer of black plastic to attract such heat as there is and to give my early crops a flying start. That's why I was extremely interested to see what this farmer here was doing.
In fact, in principle it's exactly the same as me. An enormous black polythene sheet (much bigger than anything I've ever put down), all weighed down with sand and soil and so on in sacks. That lot should warm up his soil ready for a quick spring planting.
©