I suddenly realise that it's now mid-afternoon and I've not had my butties yet, and I'm starving. I need to find a lunch stop.

Gallix, about 10 or 15kms east of Port Cartier, is said to be the place to be. "Birdwatchers can find a tranquil spot down in the marshes and observe hundreds of different species of birds" so I once read somewhere.

So here I am at my lunch stop in a tranquil spot down in the marshes and whilst there are loads of winged and feathered animal flying about, there's not one single example of any type of bird that I would be interested in watching.

Nevertheless, it's a beautiful spot here in the sun, but the wind has rather dramatically sprung up again, as you can tell by all of the sand being blown about everywhere, as you can see on the far bank of this lagoon.

That's not the southern shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence over there. It seems that we have long-since said goodbye to that, een though the sky is perfectly clear, and you can see for miles this afternoon.

Gallix is situated on the western shore of the Riviere St Marguerite and across there is, as you might expect, the eastern shore. We shall be going for a wander over there in a minute or two as there are things over there to see that should not be missed.

But never mind that for a moment. Let's turn our attention back to the western shore.

I mentioned when we were at Port-Cartier that along the North Shore of the St Lawrence River are 200 kilometres or so of some of the best beaches in North America, and Gallix is quite rightly proud of the 14 kilometres of beach that it has.

They are magnificent and the whole setting is certainly beautiful. Gallix will match anywhere you like down on the south-east coast of England at any time at all.

However it will take more money than you possess to entice me into the water here at any time of the year, never mind right now.

The path that you see in the photograph leads off to the Parc des Souvenirs, which was where I stopped for lunch.

I'm glad that I stopped off at Gallix because it gave me an opportunity to regroup my thoughts. And one of the thoughts that I had had was about skiing. I'm sure that I had once heard mention of downhill skiing around here and when I noticed the chemin du Club de Ski I knew that I was on the right track.

And so I sloped off up a side turning from Highway 138 and, sure enough, I found what I was looking for - one of the few south-facing downhill ski-slopes at this kind of altitude.

I can't remember now who it was who said something like
"I've no intention of participating in any sport that has ambulances waiting at the bottom of the hill"... "it was Erma Brombeck" - ed
but here at Gallix, this is where the ambulances park.

It's not very encouraging, is it?

Nevertheless, this is the icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned. Gallix is definitely the place for me with its water, its beaches, its views and its ski-slopes.

It does bring to mind the story of the time that I went skiing in the mountains of Bulgaria in 1994 with the much-maligned Percy Penguin, who doesn't feature in this rubbish anything like as much as she deserves.

A couple of us had gone off right to the heights, leaving the rest of the people (including Percy Penguin) lower down the slopes. We ended up being stranded up there in the fog and having to pick our way back down the mountain rather delicately
"What's the first thing that you are going to do if we ever make it back?" asked one of these people whom I was with.
"Give Percy Penguin a right good going-over" I replied.
After a pause of about a minute or two, he asked me "What's the second thing that you would do?"
"Hmmm. Take off my skis, probably".

I was once passing a mountain cabin in the Pyrenees during a snowstorm which had caused skiing to ground to a halt, and a pair of young French people were in the back doing, well, what comes naturally, I suppose.

At a certain moment the girl cried out in ecstasy "c'est exquise"
to which the boy replied "non! Ce n'est pas mes skis!"

I'm glad that I took the time out to come this way because a little further along, I found myself at the shore of lac Labrie.

I'm actually in the garden of a yokel, a local yokel and very vocal local yokel at that, by the name of Murray, and we had quite a long chat. Despite his name, he considers himself to be a real Francophone and very proud of the fact too.

The story behind his name is that his ancestor was a soldier who came to Quebec after the fall of Nouvelle France to garrison the coastline and who married a girl from the neighbourhood of his fort.

When his regiment returned to the UK at the end of its tour of duty, he opted to stay behind, as did some other soldiers in the same circumstances, and all along the North Shore of the St Lawrence can be found the descendants of these unions.

He first came to live in this area in the 1950s and to travel to Sept-Iles by road in those days used to take him about 5 hours. There was no modern road of course, and the only way to reach there was to climb over the hills on an old dirt road.

In case you are wondering, by the way (but I wasn't because I knew the answer to this already) the distance from here to Sept-Iles is much less than 50 kilometres.

So having had a really good and informative chat with Monsieur Murray I set off to do a circuit of the lake. It's quite pretty as you can see for yourselves, but i would imagine that the price of a cabin here would be totally prohibitive and there's no vacant land.

You'll notice that we are still in the middle of winter here despite it being early May, and the lake is pretty-much frozen over still. I still have a long way to go and so this is filling me with a sense of foreboding, even though it is this sort of thing that I have come to see.

Anyone who has travelled with me around Canada, and in particular when we were at Gander in Newfoundland in 2010 will know immediately what this is without any explanation.

For everyone else, it's a "Fylingdale Flyer;", a radar installation for the DEW - Distant Early-Warning - line, and its purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear-armed bombers attacking "North America".

Of course, the whole idea was nonsense.

The Soviets had no more intention of launching a nuclear attack on the West than the West had of launching a nuclear attack on the Soviets - as events of modern times have proved when, in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the West is totally powerless to intervene despite its overwhelming nuclear capacity.

Furthernore, the DEW line was not there to protect "North America" at all. It was there to protect the USA, pure and simple. Even if the Soviets were to launch a nuclear attack over the Arctic Circle, the target wouldn't be Toronto or Montreal at all but New York, or Washington DC or Chicago.

If the DEW line detected a Soviet attack, US fighter planes based on the treaty bases here in Canada would shoot down the Soviet bombers over Canadian territory, polluting Canadian soil, Canadian towns and cities and Canadian people with the atomic fall-out rather than the USA.

I'm totally surprised that the Canadian citizens accepted this kind of thing - it's the kind of thing that you don't need a telescope to see through.

As for the Canadian politicians who signed the Agreement, nothing would surprise me about them. There are doubtless some cynics who would say that some very-well-filled plain brown envelopes must have passed under the table during the signature process, but that's a dreadful allegation to make and you would never catch me repeating it.

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